My point is that you can argue rationally about whether there is design in the universe, but you cannot argue whether the design is good or bad. The later is incoherent. Maybe the Grand Designer does want to make things confusing? Maybe he has put evidence of design in the universe, but not absolute evidence for whatever reason He wants? You can make the point that the design is good or bad, but that point has no real consequence to the question about whether there is design in the first place. Thats my point.
Another interesting point;
Do you agree t...
Not quite what I am saying.
I do believe in the truth of empirically reproducible results. However, other than stating facts I do not see how these results force me to believe in anything. It is my belief system or personal philosophy that makes me conclude a interpretation of those facts.
For example:
Evolution is seen by many people through the lens of materialism/atheism. That means that while studying evolution these people ASSUME the world has no creator and and is purely physical and closed system, free from anything super-natural....and so on.
In...
So there's some seed of a potentially valid point here. Phrased in a Bayesian fashion, if one assigns low enough priors to certain hypotheses, one isn't going to practically consider those hypotheses unless one has ridiculous levels of evidence. So is something like that happening here?
I think the conclusion is "no". There are many religious individuals who have no objection to evolution. The objections stand essentially from religions which have creation stories which are important to the theology. For example, in Christianity, the Fall is very ...
For what it's worth, I used to draw a distinction between macro and micro evolution. I always argued that it made little to no sense for species to evolve sexual reproduction - and how would that work anyway?
But I remember exactly when I changed my mind. I was in a genetics class, and we were learning about sex pili - they're basically channels that bacteria can form to pass DNA between themselves. I realized that life (and evolution) are a whole hell of a lot more complicated than I gave them credit for, and that perhaps evolution is the tiniest bit more creative than I am.
I think that is where we differ, it is in the macro-micro evolutionary distinction. That mathematical model does not hold any water if you distinguish between species.
Speciation is a well-established result. See for example this not at all exhaustive list. Simply noting that species is a term that exists doesn't break the models. Moreover, the lines between many species are quite blurry, exactly as one would expect if evolution were correct. This has gotten to the point where the evidence for speciation is so overwhelming that Answers in Genesis, one of...
Lets focus on the chance vs. design conversation here first.
For all 3 of those examples you gave you would have to pick a conclusion of chance or design. Can you explain how any of those 3 could be conceived of as both chance and design at the same time? The only third option is to simply say I dont know.
There have been anomolies found in the fossil record that don't seem to make sense, but they are not deemed extreme enough by the scientific community to warrant any damage to evolution. The hypotheticals you have suggested are very extreme, do they have to be that extreme to warrant a hit on evolution or can less extreme finds also warrant questioning?
This seems to indicate a very confused thought process about how scientific theories work and are tested. A scientific theory that is wrong shouldn't have data that almost but doesn't quite fit. If evolu...
Can you name any of these anomalies which "don't seem to make sense?"
There have been various evolutionary quandaries, where it's not clear how this or that organism evolved, but many of these have been resolved by further discoveries, which clarified the line of descent. There are some lineages that are still hazy, the evolution of bats for example, where our record of their lineage is poor because their bones are delicate and do not fossilize readily, but cases like these are not a source of confusion.
All the allegations I've heard of anomalie...
Either existence happened by chance, or by design. There seems to be no third or fourth way. We are limited to these two conclusions and nothing else.
Does the structure of a crystal come about by chance, or by design?
Does the demographic distribution of visibly identifiable subcultures within a diverse population come about by chance, or by design?
If I reroll stats for my D&D character until I get one I like, does the resulting set of numbers come about by chance, or by design?
Which is to say: I reject your assertion that the middle is excluded here...
There is at least some sense in which the general pattern of evolution is not falsifiable - but to precisely that extent, it's not science. There is a mathematical certainty that an evolution-like process would occur in a system with random heritable changes that can selectively help or hinder reproduction. For a theist to deny evolution exists in general, they would have to insist God actively stops it from happening every day (or deny that random heritable mutations occur, or deny that they can help or hinder reproduction).
The standard snappy answer to this one is "fossil rabbits in the precambrian".
More generally, if we found fossils of organisms with complex adaptations which reliably dated to a time before those adaptations could plausibly have occurred (because the necessary precursors didn't exist,) then that would be a strong indication that our understanding of the development of species is wrong.
Our brain is physical, no doubt, but as you can imagine I am making a claim that mind (consciousness, spirit, whatever you want to call it) is not the same as brain. There is a connection between the two, but my argument using rational judgment is that consciousness does not seem to be physical because there is no way to understand it rationally. Your point against me is what I use against you. You say I am mistaken because I cannot even define what is consciousness, I say that is precisely the point! The only way you can reply is to hold out for the v...
I will make a point about the progress of science in this subject and then use that to step towards a more general argument for the innate mystery of consciousness with regards to reason.
Ever since the time of the enlightenment there has been a real movement in the west to view the world as purely mechanical/physical so that a conclusion of reason as a universal tool could be accepted. That meant the elimination from society of not just God but also the soul and other things.
Ironically it was a particular invention of science and reason that made ration...
Sorry for the allegorical language if it offended you.
There is a difference between not finding a solution for a problem, and not even understanding what a solution may look like even in the abstract form.
It is also not a good sign when the problem gets to be more of a mystery the more science we discover.
The concern here is that we have an irrational view that rationalism is a universal tool. The fact that we have unsolved scientific and intellectual problems is not a proof of that. The fact that there seem to be problems that in their very nature seem to be unsolvable by reason is.
The fact that the problem cannot be explained is because of the limitations of language/logic/reason....the tools that we rely on to explain mechanical phenomenon. Things that require equal signs.
The fact that this subject is not easilly explainable is not a hit against our side, it is a hit against your side. It is the non-rational aspect of consciousness that makes it seemingly impossible to explain in the first place.
The reaction of reductionists and some rationalists (I argue that it is quite rational to conlude that this is indeed a mystery as of present time) that because we cannot explain what that sensation of 'pain' is then it may not exist to begin with is dubious at best.
What we know is that reason is extremely useful when applied to mechanical/material subjects. We should continue to use it in that way.
We know that it has extreme difficulty in explaining and analyzing some key issues, including consciousness and all of its manifestations; pain/pleasure, emotions, imagination, and meaning in general as well as others. Once again, this seems to be the case because consciousness itself is extremely difficult to put into mechanical/material terms. Therefore reason has a problem with it.
If a tool is proficient in explainin...
Is there a scientific/mechanical model that would enable a machine to feel pain? Not react to pain as if it did feel pain, but to actually feel pain in the same sense as a human does? The answer is no, there is nothing in science or philosophy that can come up with such a model even in theory, much less using current technology.
And that is only a small part of consciousness. Our abilities to understand and appreciate 'meaning', our vision, imagination, sense of free will....our general human experience of ourselves and our environment cannot be mathema...
Biology textbooks reflect the belief that "The world is purely physical/material in nature" by not even entertaining the possibility that there could be a super natural cause for anything. Any natural activity is assumed to have a physical/material cause. This is philosophy, so it may not be physically written out that way in the biology textbooks, but everything in the textbooks points to this major world assumption.
Same with the issue of free will. Any act by a species is seen in a way that needs to be explained in chemical/biological/mech... (read more)