Why I am not an atheist.

[Audie]

You're quoting Dennett's 1995 book who is in turn using a quote from 1979 in a chapter called "Molecular Evolution" in which he is talking about what was then the current thinking about how that 'problem' can be overcome.

Here's something a bit more up to date - a self-replicating strand of RNA:

NNNNNNUGCUCGAUUGGUAACAGUUUGAAUGGGUUGAAGUAU–GAGACCGNNNNNN

It's called R3C. N is "don't care" and the other letters are standard. From: Creation: The Origin of Life / The Future of Life by Adam Rutherford.

Ah so it was quote mined, just as I suspected. Good catch.

 

[Audie]

Oh my! Is this supposed to be an argument against evolution? It is far from it. In fact it is in effect an admission that evolution is a fact. Sadly what you did hear is a logical fallacy called "moving the goalposts". And you moved them all the way out of evolution. The only reason that one moves the goalpost is because they have not answer to the actual argument and if one moves them totally out of the scope of the argument that is in effect an admission that one is wrong.

In case you did not understand it your error was to move the argument out of evolution and into abiogenesis. Evolution does not rely on abiogenesis. Scientists only state that abiogenesis was the most likely cause for first life. It is another argument all together. Evolution works whether the LUCA was a product of evolution, visiting aliens, or poofed into existence by a magical god.

Now if you want to discuss abiogenesis that is fine. But you will not find that some anonymous "pretty world renown scientists" can refute it. You would need to find scientists that were experts in the field. Not any scientist off the street no matter how famous.

Apparently its harder to parody our hero than I thought. Here is the same creationist- stuns -the -atheist scenario I described,
except I simplified it with chicken / egg.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Ah so it was quote mined, just as I suspected. Good catch.

Why do creationists even bother quote mining these days? That was effective before the days of the Internet, but today anyone can copy a phrase and do a Google search on it.

 

[ratiocinator]

Ah so it was quote mined, just as I suspected. Good catch.

It's some time since I read it but Darwin's Dangerous Idea is actually a very good book. Dennett is a philosopher who actually takes the time and trouble to get to grips with the science he talks about. From the same book:

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose, with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."

 

[Audie]

Why do creationists even bother quote mining these days? That was effective before the days of the Internet, but today anyone can copy a phrase and do a Google search on it.

Its unlikely in the extreme that any of our
heros of the faith do any research, like
actually reading books or cross referencing.

For one-
If they did they'd know they have no argument
against ToE. It may yet still prove rotten root to
stem, but as yet nobody has found the flaw.

As it is, the vast majorities go to creo-sitee
where they find PREDIGEDTED quotes and arguments.
To be charitable- why not, dress are not bad people, few are intentionally dishonest,
so I expect they don't even know they are being
scammed with quote mined material,
and present it in good, um, faith.

ETA. Stupid Samsung spell changer

 

[Audie]

It's some time since I read it but Darwin's Dangerous Idea is actually a very good book. Dennett is a philosopher who actually takes the time and trouble to get to grips with the science he talks about. From the same book:

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose, with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."

It would be well for @John D. Brey to state that he made an honest mistake, having failed to read the quote in context. Deliberate misrepresentation is, after all, highly dishonest,
and few here care for that kind of discussion.

 

[John D. Brey]

No, subjective reality may appear to be real to the person experiencing it, but that doesn't mean it is objectively real. It may not be an objective perception of the world they are actually living in.

. . . I think semantics might be getting in the way of our discussion? Technically speaking, or at least the way I'm using the words, all experience of reality is "subjective" since it's the world as experienced by the subject. As Schopenhauer insightfully pointed out, the world is my world.

The "objective" world would be the world as it exists prior to being colored and interpreted by a living subject. As Immanuel Kant pointed out, if we eliminate every quality added to the impulses received from the outside world by our own body, what would be left would be utterly unrecognizable to the subject.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

Natural selection, John

What does the word "selection" mean to you?



John

 

[John D. Brey]

You seem to neglect the fact that many other species show intelligence. That humans display vastly more might be unusual, and the fact that H Sapiens were the ones to top out as the 'winners' over the many other similar species, but that is what happened. Perhaps some other related species would be typing all this given different circumstances. Intelligence does seem to have a habit of building on the past (and the knowledge gained), and why wouldn't it - what is the alternative - no such thing as intelligence?

Are you aware that you appear to be personifying "Intelligence"?




John

 

[John D. Brey]

Oh my! Is this supposed to be an argument against evolution? It is far from it. In fact it is in effect an admission that evolution is a fact. Sadly what you did hear is a logical fallacy called "moving the goalposts". And you moved them all the way out of evolution. The only reason that one moves the goalpost is because they have not answer to the actual argument and if one moves them totally out of the scope of the argument that is in effect an admission that one is wrong.

In case you did not understand it your error was to move the argument out of evolution and into abiogenesis. Evolution does not rely on abiogenesis. Scientists only state that abiogenesis was the most likely cause for first life. It is another argument all together. Evolution works whether the LUCA was a product of evolution, visiting aliens, or poofed into existence by a magical god.

Now if you want to discuss abiogenesis that is fine. But you will not find that some anonymous "pretty world renown scientists" can refute it. You would need to find scientists that were experts in the field. Not any scientist off the street no matter how famous.

One of the strands of thought in this thread is that rocks don't really evolve like living organisms do. So the distinction between a rock and a living organism is at least one way of zeroing in on why one evolves and the other doesn't. The genesis of this fundamental distinction surely hides keys to the process of evolution.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

As I said, you figure you know more about evolution than any scientist on earth.

"Design needs a designer" is a cute phrase,
very satisfying to the shallow thinker and the
unlearned. People who think news of the tautological is somehow clever.

" it is what it is" is just as profound as your
design-designer semantic trick.

"Design" is a word, like "create"
that describes human activities.

A less benighted student of biology knows
that what you are pleased to think is design
is actually Jerry- rigged modifications of
structures that originally served different purposes.

No competent designer / engineer would
dream of concocting an ear out of gill arches-
If you knew any anatomy you could list for me
more of the clunky weird structures evolution has given us.

See how calling it ad structure eliminates the
need for calling in a designer?

A waterfall doesn't need a waterfallist
to show it how to go.

And a god above the level of the tinpot
God you are evidently imagining really ought,
being omnipotent and super smart, to be able to
design a universe that can run itself, doesn't need a "designer " to constantly tinker and meddle to keep it working.

The idea I find in the Jewish sages I study is that the divine designer created the world absolutely perfect except for one element, freewill. Freewill led to a challenge to the perfect order that led to the destruction of the perfect world.

Naturally, God knew this would happen such that the spectrum between the original perfect world, and the utter chaos after its destruction, is the poles through which our experience of an asymmetrical arrow of time is moving. The absolutely perfect world is the future, the chaos is the past.

On the way to the future, which is really the origin, in a sense the past, life must pass through various imperfect stages before, through evolutionary processes, every imperfection is eliminated through natural selection.

As Einstein said, the distinction between past and future is really only an illusion. And time and space are not really things that exist as we experience them, but merely ways we experience what is objectively real, where, i.e, objective reality, there's no space or arrow of time, or means for being experienced. "Experience" requires an experiencer. And an experiencer is shielded, by the nature of his body, from objective reality.

Naturally this is too abstract to be of use to those of us who are comfortable living within the straight-jacket of the illusory world served up to us by the bodies we inhabit at this stage of evolution.



John

 

[Audie]

What does the word "selection" mean to you?



John

SELECTION and its synonyms all involve a conscious act of choosing.

So the word "selection" is unfortunate as it can cause confusion.

Try looking at it this way.

Evolution is based on what works. If white feathers work for hiding in the snow, the bird gets to reproduce. If black feathers get the bird eaten, it does not reproduce.

The birds made no choice.


Another way to try looking at it would be
that a raindrop has no volition.

Yet it, and trillions of others each made the "selection" of the direction that gravity, a NATURAL force, "selected".

The result is the formation of a marvelously complex river system that a lifetime of study would not begin to uncovervall its complexity.

At each point our rain drop only did what it had to do because of the forces acting on it.

Evolution works as it does not thro "choices" but because things happen the only way they can.
Each alternative was actually impossible.

Natural "selection" is actually the opposite of selection if one goes by dictionary definition
instead of understanding the meaning as a term of art in biology. Like a corporation being a person in legal usage.

You easily earn half a point for questioning the
word "selection".

If you can select a better word that reflects
how evolution actually works, plz do so.

 

[Audie]

One of the strands of thought in this thread is that rocks don't really evolve like living organisms do. So the distinction between a rock and a living organism is at least one way of zeroing in on why one evolves and the other doesn't. The genesis of this fundamental distinction surely hides keys to the process of evolution.



John

Well, yes and no. Rocks like living things
respond to forces acting on them.
The fundamental difference is that rocks don't reproduce. No genetics.

 

[Audie]

The idea I find in the Jewish sages I study is that the divine designer created the world absolutely perfect except for one element, freewill. Freewill led to a challenge to the perfect order that led to the destruction of the perfect world.

Naturally, God knew this would happen such that the spectrum between the original perfect world, and the utter chaos after its destruction, is the poles through which our experience of an asymmetrical arrow of time is moving. The absolutely perfect world is the future, the chaos is the past.

On the way to the future, which is really the origin, in a sense the past, life must pass through various imperfect stages before, through evolutionary processes, every imperfection is eliminated through natural selection.

As Einstein said, the distinction between past and future is really only an illusion. And time and space are not really things that exist as we experience them, but merely ways we experience what is objectively real, where, i.e, objective reality, there's no space or arrow of time, or means for being experienced. "Experience" requires an experiencer. And an experiencer is shielded, by the nature of his body, from objective reality.

Naturally this is too abstract to be of use to those of us who are comfortable living within the straight-jacket of the illusory world served up to us by the bodies we inhabit at this stage of evolution.



John

Some of that is plainly so but unfortunately
it has little or nothing to do with what I said.

We will keep trying though. If you can open your mind to explanations of how evolution actually works, it will maybe serve to improve your cosmology in some ways, not a bad goal, eh?

 

[ratiocinator]

One of the strands of thought in this thread is that rocks don't really evolve like living organisms do. So the distinction between a rock and a living organism is at least one way of zeroing in on why one evolves and the other doesn't. The genesis of this fundamental distinction surely hides keys to the process of evolution.

The process is not hidden. The distinction is reproduction with inheritance and variation and that is also the process or evolution. How you start the process off is not directly relevant to how it works.

 

[ratiocinator]

The idea I find in the Jewish sages I study is that the divine designer created the world absolutely perfect except for one element, freewill.

Free will with respect to omniscient, omnipotent creator, is simply incoherent nonsense. The only version of free will that makes any logical sense is compatibilism.

As Einstein said, the distinction between past and future is really only an illusion.

Yes - his theories suggest the 'block universe' picture, which is another reason to think free will is nonsensical.

And time and space are not really things that exist as we experience them, but merely ways we experience what is objectively real, where, i.e, objective reality, there's no space or arrow of time, or means for being experienced.

Now you seem to have gone off on your own tangent. Since Einstein's theories are all about the mathematics that describe space and time (space-time) this looks somewhat inaccurate. Space-time most definitely exist in his theories and the arrow of time probably has more to do with entropy.

 

[SkepticThinker]

In a book I authored twenty-years ago, I pointed out that a successful argument against Darwinism and scientific materialism in general demands that the arguer step outside the circumscription of the principles and ideas that make Darwinism and scientific materialism appear to be viable in the first place. Darwinism and scientific materialism can be seen to be false from root to branch so long as the wrong-headed conceptualism in which they sprouted is doused with a good dose of the weed-killer known as truth.

In that spirit, rather than go point-by-point through Evangelicalhumanist's list (and discussion) for why he's an atheist, it seems more propitious to cut to the chase concerning Evangelicalhumanist's list since every element suffers from the same fundamental conceptual error.



John

Sorry, but what does your post have to do with atheism?

 

[Audie]

Free will with respect to omniscient, omnipotent creator, is simply incoherent nonsense. The only version of free will that makes any logical sense is compatibilism.



Yes - his theories suggest the 'block universe' picture, which is another reason to think free will is nonsensical.



Now you seem to have gone off on your own tangent. Since Einstein's theories are all about the mathematics that describe space and time (space-time) this looks somewhat inaccurate. Space-time most definitely exist in his theories and the arrow of time probably has more to do with entropy.

Well to be fair, only one person here thinks he understands science.

 

[Subduction Zone]

One of the strands of thought in this thread is that rocks don't really evolve like living organisms do. So the distinction between a rock and a living organism is at least one way of zeroing in on why one evolves and the other doesn't. The genesis of this fundamental distinction surely hides keys to the process of evolution.



John

Well that is a rather foolish argument. And it is an admission that evolution is a fact in its approach alone. If you want to continue to debate you cannot pretend to have refuted evolution. When you move the goalposts that is an admission of defeat.

 

[ppp]

What does the word "selection" mean to you?



John

In what context, john?