The Origin of Specious Nonsense. Twelve years on. Still going. Answer soon.

Obliq

legspin wrote: »

It's just every time I see this thread has ascended from the bowels again, I wince at the nonsense being expounded yet once more. I really can't fathom the patience shown by the other posters in answering him.

I think it's become a kind of sport legspin. See how much of the endless crazy you can draw out, refute and disprove before imploding. I can't read it anymore either.

Cabaal

mickrock wrote: »

Atheists have the strange belief that nature itself and the evolutionary process are unintelligent.

Maintaining this belief must require a lot of faith and cause some cognitive dissonance when the obvious conclusion is that intelligence must be inherent in the natural world.

belief & faith?
seriously?

:rolleyes:

Penny 4 Thoughts

mickrock wrote: »

Atheists have the strange belief that nature itself and the evolutionary process are unintelligent.

Maintaining this belief must require a lot of faith and cause some cognitive dissonance when the obvious conclusion is that intelligence must be inherent in the natural world.

Hi mickrock

Can you expand on what you mean by intelligence in that statement. Are you a pantheist? If so I would be very interested in what you believe the intrinsic nature of intelligence to actually be, as pantheism has always fascinated me.

Brian Shanahan

Penny 4 Thoughts wrote: »

Hi mickrock

Can you expand on what you mean by intelligence in that statement. Are you a pantheist? If so I would be very interested in what you believe the intrinsic nature of intelligence to actually be, as pantheism has always fascinated me.

Mick's a YEC, pantheism would probably horrify him as much as my atheism does.

mickrock

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

Mick's a YEC, pantheism would probably horrify him as much as my atheism does.

I'm not a YEC and I find pantheism very appealing. I don't find your atheism horrifying, just amusing and irrational.

(BTW it's a bit presumptuous of you to assume you know what I believe and don't believe.)

Anyway, the idea of nature being intelligent can't be even mentioned here because it's apparently "nonsense". How very open minded.

robindch

mickrock wrote: »

Anyway, the idea of nature being intelligent can't be even mentioned here because it's apparently "nonsense". How very open minded.

Feel free to talk as much as you like about creationism here.

Brian Shanahan

mickrock wrote: »

I'm not a YEC

Well then, why are you so quick to defend creationism? It's not like it's got any validity, at all, after all.

Bellatori

mickrock wrote: »

...Anyway, the idea of nature being intelligent can't be even mentioned here...

I am sure you can mention it all you like. You probably need to explain what you mean by nature and then explain how it is intelligent. I look forward to reading your post on the matter.

nozzferrahhtoo

mickrock wrote: »

I don't find your atheism horrifying, just amusing and irrational.

I am unsure what is "irrational" about failing to believe unsubstantiated assertion? Perhaps you can enlighten me.

And the claim there is a god is, thus far, unsubstantiated assertion. No one is providing the first shred of a scrap of evidence that a non human intentional agent is responsible for the creation and/or subsequent maintenance of our universe. Much less you.

So no, there is nothing irrational about simply rejecting that assertion.

mickrock wrote: »

Anyway, the idea of nature being intelligent can't be even mentioned here because it's apparently "nonsense". How very open minded.

Except you did just mention it. And the world has not ended. So stop making things up about the forum that are not true.

"Nonsense" is not the word I would use. "Unsubstantiated" is. The idea nature is intelligent is simply unsubstantiated by anyone here. Much less you.

nagirrac

Although reading this thread normally gives me a headache and I should know better, there is one issue on the whole creationism versus evolution argument that needs clarification, and that is it's an argument that suffers from two logical fallacies, it is both a category error and a false dichotomy.

Creationism in its various flavors offers a non testable i.e. non scientific hypothesis for how the universe we inhabit started and how life emerged, the work of some kind of supreme intelligence. Evolution has nothing to do with this question, it is a scientific theory based on mountains of evidence that is our best current theory on how DNA based life evolved once it got started. That is the category error. Evolution has nothing to do with how the universe started, if it started, or how life emerged from inanimate matter.

Creationism versus evolution is also a false dichotomy as it fails to consider other alternatives. Leaving aside panspermia, the most obvious middle ground is that nature in its broadest meaning is both purposeful and intelligent in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

The question was asked what do we mean by nature and what do we mean by intelligence? For the purpose of this discussion I would use the broad wiki definition of "the phenomena of the physical world, including all of life, from the subatomic to the cosmic". By definition this has to include all the laws of nature that determine how the universe evolves and how life emerged and evolves.

Intelligence is a very difficult concept to pin down, in particular in light of modern scientific discovery. It is imo a supremely arrogant position of humans to assign intelligence to themselves, and deny it to other species. It is also a very Christian concept that places humans at the pinnacle of evolution, disregarding the fact that other species have been around for hundreds of millions of years longer than we have and will most likely be still around millions of years after we have gone, assuming we have not destroyed their habitat.

There are two scientific findings in recent years that anyone interested in this topic should think long and hard about. One is the work of Toshiyuki Nakagaki in Japan, recently duplicated by a group in the US, demonstrating that unicellular amoeba can learn to navigate a maze.

http://www.nature.com/news/how-brainless-slime-molds-redefine-intelligence-1.11811

The second is even more fascinating which is the phenomena of honeybee waggle dances, a sophisticated language first studied by the Nobel prize winning Karl von Frisch. The attached paper explains this behavior in detail, but in short when a worker bee returns to the hive after finding a source of food, it communicated both the distance and direction to the food source using a dance routine which translates the horizontal direction of the food source relative to the position of the sun, to a vertical direction of dance routine. In other words if the food source is located 60 degrees horizontally to the left of the sun, the dance will be performed 60 degrees left of vertical. This is quite the feat considering that the sun moves constantly during the day and the angle of the dance has to be adjusted to reflect this.

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/1.11%20copy.pdf

The trivial answer one hears is this is just instinct, which doesn't tell us anything. The truth is we have no idea currently how honeybees accomplish this, with their less than a million neurons compared our trillion, not to speak of the amoeba that have no neurons at all. Behaviors like these are clearly somehow embedded in DNA, as all the evidence demonstrates that honeybees emerge with this ability and no evidence to suggest any training is involved.

The scientific community is slowly coming to terms with the fact that all of nature is teeming with what we refer to as intelligence, based on information processing. We simply cannot dismiss this because of our current lack of knowledge of how this intelligence emerges and what mechanisms are utilized in it's application.

nozzferrahhtoo

nagirrac wrote: »

Creationism in its various flavors offers a non testable i.e. non scientific hypothesis for how the universe we inhabit started and how life emerged

Not so sure I accept that as default. I do not think non testability is true by default. Perhaps we fail to think of any tests now or perhaps the tests we can think of are just beyond our current ability to engage with. But declaring by fiat from the outset that the claims are untestable is quite the assertion.

nagirrac wrote: »

the most obvious middle ground is that nature in its broadest meaning is both purposeful and intelligent in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

I have seen no substantiation for the hypothesis above however. That nature is purposeful or intelligent is a claim you have tried to carry on these fora before but you retreated quiet quickly from it when pressed on it. You simply ran away.

You clearly WANT to think nature is intelligent in some way. You however seemingly lack even the smallest basis for doing so.

nagirrac wrote: »

Intelligence is a very difficult concept to pin down

Yet on the thread you retreated from with your tail firmly tucked away, you posted a very specific list of definitions and attributes of it. Which I systematically unpacked and showed how not only few but NONE of the attributes applies to evolution.

Not only did you not reply to this in your retreat, you appear to have ignored it and have decided to pop up in this thread espousing the same baseless nonsense again as if it was not sufficiently decimated before.

That there is continuum of intelligence across the species on our planet is not something I would disagree with. That many species are "higher" on this continuum than we might have previously placed them is also not contentious to me, nor is the idea some species might be closer to us on that continuum than we thought.

But your efforts to suggest nature itself is intelligent.... is to date something you have supported by nothing but repetition of the claim. And repetition of an assertion does not substantiation make.

mickrock

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

The idea nature is intelligent is simply unsubstantiated by anyone here.

But neither is there any substantiation that the origin of life and its evolution can be explained by materialistic means.

You have your own creation stories/myths about how blind and dumb matter/energy/forces were responsible.

Apparently life came about accidently (abiogenesis) and blindly evolved slowly and gradually (Darwinism). This is the story you like to believe although it is without proof. There's no proof of abiogenesis. Darwinism can account for basic adaptations but hasn't the creative power to produce novelty.

The creation story you choose to believe in is flimsy and unsubstantiated. You may also believe that in the future materialistic science will be able to explain it all, a faith that Karl Popper wryly called "promissory materialism".

King Mob

mickrock wrote: »

Darwinism can account for basic adaptations but hasn't the creative power to produce novelty.

Why can't it exactly? How is magic/god able to produce this? (Please be specific with mechanisms and process)

mickrock wrote: »

You may also believe that in the future materialistic science will be able to explain it all, a faith that Karl Popper wryly called "promissory materialism".

Again why can't it?

nozzferrahhtoo

mickrock wrote: »

But neither is there any substantiation that the origin of life and its evolution can be explained by materialistic means.

Substantiation there in fact is actually. 100% proof no, but substantiation is there. So on one hand we have an ENTIRELY unsubstantiated hypothesis based at its foundation on a similarly ENTIRELY unsubstantiated assertion (that a god exists).... and on the other hand we have hypotheses based on at least some arguments, evidence, data and reasoning.

So your attempt to conflate and compare the two monumentally fails.

There simply is no support at all.... certainly none coming from you.... that any intelligence whatsoever exists behind the creation, operation and/or maintenance of our universe.

If you feel you have any then I am all ears. Or eyes. As the case may be.

oscarBravo

mickrock wrote: »

Darwinism can account for basic adaptations but hasn't the creative power to produce novelty.

This seems to be one of the favoured creationist repeat-a-lie-often-enough tropes.

Who says that "creative power" is required to "produce novelty"? Assuming you accept that genes can mutate during reproduction, why do you argue that the mutations are not novel?

Even a random number generator produces novelty. As specious arguments go, that one's a doozie.

gaynorvader

mickrock wrote: »

But neither is there any substantiation that the origin of life and its evolution can be explained by materialistic means.

You have your own creation stories/myths about how blind and dumb matter/energy/forces were responsible.

Apparently life came about accidently (abiogenesis) and blindly evolved slowly and gradually (Darwinism). This is the story you like to believe although it is without proof. There's no proof of abiogenesis. Darwinism can account for basic adaptations but hasn't the creative power to produce novelty.

The creation story you choose to believe in is flimsy and unsubstantiated. You may also believe that in the future materialistic science will be able to explain it all, a faith that Karl Popper wryly called "promissory materialism".

The origin of life is not explained by evolution. I don't think the origin is even explained by materialistic means (there are theories and models, but I think we're still a ways from a definitive one). Evolution however, is actually about as well proven as a theory as gravity is.
If you were to tell me that God created the world and evolution, with the knowledge of the exact course that evolution would take, I would consider that a reasonable belief. If you were to tell me you also knew the nature of God, I'd be skeptical, but still ok with it. When you tell me that any serious scientific evidence for evolution is either wrong or put there by God to test us, I put that in the same category as magic and elves.

PopePalpatine

mickrock wrote: »

Darwinism can account for basic adaptations but hasn't the creative power to produce novelty.

Can you please define these "novelties"?

Brian Shanahan

gaynorvader wrote: »

The origin of life is not explained by evolution. I don't think the origin is even explained by materialistic means (there are theories and models, but I think we're still a ways from a definitive one).

You're wrong there about the non-material origin of life bit. The main reason we don't have a settled theory of abiogenesis is not (as it would be with a lot of uncertain science) that we lack any hypotheses that adequately explain the evidence, but that we have too many. We know that there are ways of creating life without any outside agency, Miller-Urey proved that, but due to the fact that we don't know what the exact conditions were on early earth, how quickly life got going, and the competing hypotheses we cannot say how exactly it happened.

It always amuses me when the creationists try and use the lack of an explanation of abiogenesis as a way of shoehorning god into the equation, we have the usual "just because A doesn't explain, it doesn't follow that B does", but in addition we have the issue as I stated above, that the problem with abiogenesis is not a lack of plausible explanations but too many!

nagirrac

It always amazes me when posters make claims for science that science itself would never make. Gaynorvader above is 100% correct and Brain Shanahan could not be more incorrect if he tried. Miller-Urey demonstrated 50 years ago that a range of amino acids, among many other compounds, could be made if you mix methane, water, ammonia and hydrogen in a flask and fired sparks across electrodes within the flask to simulate lightning. To claim that this demonstrates "there are ways of creating life without any outside agency" is one of the most baffling statements of scientific illiteracy I have ever read on any internet forum, but I suppose belongs on this thread, specious nonsense indeed.

The Miller-Urey experiment demonstrates that chemistry is a thing, and if you mix certain compounds with others in the right conditions you produce more complex compounds. Nature is pretty good at this already, there are over 500 known naturally occurring amino acids, of which 20 are used in the various organisms we refer to as life. Amino acids have not just been found in chemistry lab flasks, the same compounds have been found inside meteorites. It is quite reasonable to suggest that the amino acids used in life forms came from naturally occurring reactions in the early earth's atmosphere, or that they were deposited here by meteorites, but to suggest this demonstrates a way of creating life is truly baffling.

Bellatori

nagirrac wrote: »

..

I would point out that more recent experiments on early earth conditions have produced RNA strands... Even more importantly was an important step to understanding the RNA-> DNA issue here

The arguments for abiogenesis are getting whittled down to - it happened here...

mickrock

gaynorvader wrote: »

I don't think the origin is even explained by materialistic means (there are theories and models, but I think we're still a ways from a definitive one).

Really? What else could be involved so?

gaynorvader wrote: »

Evolution however, is actually about as well proven as a theory as gravity is.

I'm not disputing evolution, just the unquestioned assumption that it has all happened by blind, unintelligent means. There's no evidence to back this up whatsoever.

Intelligence is ruled out from the outset, just because it's seen as unappealing and has too much baggage, and everyone ends up clinging to the blind-and-dumb explanations because that's all that's left

Bellatori

mickrock wrote: »

...I'm not disputing evolution, just the unquestioned assumption that it has all happened by blind, unintelligent means. ...t

What does (un)intelligent mean in the context of a chemical reaction?

Whenever I see this type of argument I always think that we are seeing a rehash of the Fred Hoyle commentary. It is too improbable to happen. That is really what this argument is about. Statistics.

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.

This is quite well dealt with here.

The funny thing is that creationists love the Hoyle analogy and yet Hoyle himself was using it as an argument for panspermia and not a designer God! A fact I have always found rather ironic.

oscarBravo

mickrock wrote: »

I'm not disputing evolution, just the unquestioned assumption that it has all happened by blind, unintelligent means. There's no evidence to back this up whatsoever.

If your competing hypotheses are that chemical compounds were created by the laws of physics or that chemical compounds were created by something outside the laws of physics, I don't think it's the former that suffers from a lack of evidence.

nozzferrahhtoo

nagirrac wrote: »

It always amazes me when posters make claims for science that science itself would never make.

And it never amazes you that you make scientific claims that are based on quite literally no science whatsoever?

Weird.

Like your attempts to apply definitions of "intelligence" to "evolution" for example?

Or your seriously comedy of errors from which you ran away really quickly to try and substantiation the idea of reincarnation?

Your attempts to pass off the linguistic abilities of a single subject in the billions of people alive on this planet.... as evidence of reincarnation..... really is "one of the most baffling statements of scientific illiteracy I have ever read on any internet forum, but I suppose belongs on this thread, specious nonsense indeed."

I really struggle with you not to trot out cliche "pot and kettle" type comments. I really do.

nagirrac

Bellatori wrote: »

I would point out that more recent experiments on early earth conditions have produced RNA strands... Even more importantly was an important step to understanding the RNA-> DNA issue here

The arguments for abiogenesis are getting whittled down to - it happened here...

I agree, it happened here on earth. There is little doubt in my mind that life emerged on earth via natural causes and that we will eventually discover the mechanisms involved. What we have currently are a large number of competing hypotheses, the article above misuses the word theory imo, as abiogenesis is still in its infancy and not at the stage of scientific theory. It is an incredibly difficult area of research, if it were simple we could obviously synthesize a basic unicellular organism in the laboratory.

Although certainly plausible, I find panspermia much more unlikely as an explanation for how cellular life first emerged on earth. Perhaps some of the raw materials, even complex organic compounds, arrived via meteorites or comets, but even very primitive unicellular organisms much more unlikely.

For some reason, and gaynorvader touched on this, some people have difficulty separating the topics of science and scientific evidence from religious beliefs and the evidence (or lack of evidence) for such beliefs. I have been around scientists all my working life, of all flavors, religious and non religious, all flavors of religion, and the one thing they have in common is they do not insert their beliefs, or lack of beliefs for that matter, into their work. Those that are religious have no problem being scientists and being religious, and those that are non religious or atheist have no issue with their colleagues who are religious.

The noise in the debate is between a tiny subset of scientists and more typically non scientists who seek to invoke science as an argument against belief in God and the personal value of religion, and a small subset of religious who want to lay claim to science, typically not having much clue of the subject matter. For example, the great majority of Christians worldwide have no issues at all with the theory of evolution, and why would they, the father of genetics which is the most solid evidence based pillar supporting evolution was an Augustinian friar. George Lamaitre, a Catholic priest, first proposed the big bang theory and Ken Miller a noted Cellular Biologist and professor at Brown University, who happens to be a Roman Catholic, testified against ID at the Dover trial.

The science versus religion debate is largely trash talking garbage, with a serious lack of understanding of the opponents subject matter on both sides.

gaynorvader

mickrock wrote: »

{...}
I'm not disputing evolution, just the unquestioned assumption that it has all happened by blind, unintelligent means. There's no evidence to back this up whatsoever.

Intelligence is ruled out from the outset, just because it's seen as unappealing and has too much baggage, and everyone ends up clinging to the blind-and-dumb explanations because that's all that's left

I think you may not realise what the "debate" (used loosely) on this thread is about. It is more evolution vs young earth creationism (the earth is 6000 years old, dinosaurs existed up until about 5000 years ago, etc) than evolution vs God.

Even if scientists were to prove conclusively tomorrow exactly how the universe and life on our planet came about, it would still leave room for a creator God, who set those events in motion. Belief in such an entity may not be rational, but humans aren't, by nature, particularly rational beings.

nagirrac

gaynorvader wrote: »

Belief in such an entity may not be rational, but humans aren't, by nature, particularly rational beings.

Humans are both rational and irrational, and often at the same time

I know many people who appear completely rational when it comes to certain subjects, and absolutely irrational when it comes to others (those of us who follow sports are especially prone to irrationality. Liverpool will of course win the league next year, and in actual fact won it in April.. before losing it mysteriously in May. I have a few friends who are Liverpool fans and they are still in complete denial and claim that the league was somehow unjustly stolen from them by Chelsea who had the appalling cheek to beat them unfairly by refusing to concede goals ). One of the most common areas where people are completely irrational is how they see themselves, which is very often diametrically opposed to how others see them, hence one of the most valuable aspects of introspective analysis is to reflect on who you are and more importantly why you are the way you are.

There are rational theists and irrational theists when it comes to their beliefs and their justification for these beliefs. If someone says their religion and religious practice provides them with a positive outcome such as reduced anxiety or increased happiness in their lives, then I find this completely rational and who the hell am I to question them. If however someone tells me there is no evidence for evolution because of what humans believed 4,000 years ago, then I find this completely irrational. If an atheist tells me they find no reason to believe in God or participate in religion I find this completely rational, if however they tell me that all religious people are irrational because they base their religious beliefs on conditioning due to life experience and cultural factors, I tend to find this irrational as they are forgetting or ignoring that their own life experience and cultural factors lead to their personal beliefs or lack of beliefs.

It is a non trivial question and there is no easy answer. Humans seek both truth and happiness to varying degrees, and there is no easy path to accomplishing both.

Bellatori

gaynorvader wrote: »

...Even if scientists were to prove conclusively tomorrow exactly how the universe and life on our planet came about, it would still leave room for a creator God, who set those events in motion...

Really? In the end there are two possibilities.

1. Universe-> Univers as an auto boot... something from nothing
2. God-> Universe A divine intervention.

Of the two we DO have some evidence that something can come from nothing viz positron electron pairs CAN appear from 'nowhere' but we have zilch evidence for God. Occam's Razor says go for the simplest and therefore we go for one as there is no evidence for two AND it requires us to invent additional unsupported features.

nagirrac

Bellatori wrote: »

Of the two we DO have some evidence that something can come from nothing viz positron electron pairs CAN appear from 'nowhere' but we have zilch evidence for God.

How does you define "nowhere"? Positron electron pairs no more come from nothing, than annihilate to nothing when they collide. When a positron and electron collide they are annihilated as mass carrying particles BUT they produce photons. The reverse is also true, photons interacting give rise to matter / antimatter particle pairs.

This has been discussed previously on other threads, but the "nothing" that physicists refer to is not the absence of everything we refer to as matter, it is the absence of mass carrying particles. I am no expert in this field but there are a still a lot of open questions in QFT.

As far are we currently know with respect to our observed universe, "nothing" (as in the absence of anything) does not exist. What was thought of previously as the vacuum of empty space has mass carrying particles constantly popping in and out of existence, but just as they are produced as positive and negative pairs like positrons and electrons, they seemingly are produced by positive and negative energy sources.

J C

nagirrac wrote: »

Humans are both rational and irrational, and often at the same time

I know many people who appear completely rational when it comes to certain subjects, and absolutely irrational when it comes to others (those of us who follow sports are especially prone to irrationality. Liverpool will of course win the league next year, and in actual fact won it in April.. before losing it mysteriously in May. I have a few friends who are Liverpool fans and they are still in complete denial and claim that the league was somehow unjustly stolen from them by Chelsea who had the appalling cheek to beat them unfairly by refusing to concede goals ). One of the most common areas where people are completely irrational is how they see themselves, which is very often diametrically opposed to how others see them, hence one of the most valuable aspects of introspective analysis is to reflect on who you are and more importantly why you are the way you are.

There are rational theists and irrational theists when it comes to their beliefs and their justification for these beliefs. If someone says their religion and religious practice provides them with a positive outcome such as reduced anxiety or increased happiness in their lives, then I find this completely rational and who the hell am I to question them. If however someone tells me there is no evidence for evolution because of what humans believed 4,000 years ago, then I find this completely irrational. If an atheist tells me they find no reason to believe in God or participate in religion I find this completely rational, if however they tell me that all religious people are irrational because they base their religious beliefs on conditioning due to life experience and cultural factors, I tend to find this irrational as they are forgetting or ignoring that their own life experience and cultural factors lead to their personal beliefs or lack of beliefs.

It is a non trivial question and there is no easy answer. Humans seek both truth and happiness to varying degrees, and there is no easy path to accomplishing both.

You are quite correct that all Humans are potentially both rational and irrational.
The irrationality ususally accompanies something with which they have a deep emotional attachment. For example sports fanatics have a deep emotional attachment to their chosen team ... and they are often irrational in their assessment of situations involving their team.
Equally, Theists may hold their faith with deep emotional attachment ... and therefore may not be receptive to logical arguments in relation to particular aspects of their faith.
... but such emotional attachement is also not exclusively confined to Theists .... Atheists can be equally emotionally attached to their belief in the non-existence of God ... and therefore may also not be receptive to rational arguments in relation to particular aspects of Atheism.