All of moedavid's Comments + Replies

Fair enough. I'm glad you agree it's an empirical question. Having got that concession from you, I'll tell you I actually don't agree with Chu-Carroll's analysis. Of course everything is definition-dependent here, but in essence, I don't think free will is an illusion. Rather, I think the opposition of determinism to free will is just mistaken. Determinism does not imply no free will. This position is called compatibilism. What Chu-Carroll is saying is that free will is not some weird force outside physics that thaumaturgically makes an electron zig instead of zag, causing the miracle of choice. I agree up to there. So if that's what you call free will, then it is an illusion. He then implies "there is no free will." Indeed, not under that definition. But that's not what I call free will. See Daniel Dennett's "Elbow Room;" also search this site for "Free Will." Eliezer has done some excellent writing on the subject.

Something is either determined or it is undetermined, to some degree random. We can make sense of no third option. The free will you want is apparently not compatible with determinism (too bad, mine is). But the free will you want is also not random- how could we be held responsible for a random event? Could a flip of a coin be what determines whether you act wrongly or rightly? You ask for something that is neither determined nor undetermined and such a thing is impossible on pain of sacrificing the basic concepts we use to understand the world. Of course we can. But that isn't evidence of the sort of free will you're talking about. I can do whatever I want. It just so happens that what I want is causally determined. That's okay, almost everything is causally determined. The kind of free will you're talking about isn't even magic. At least everything Harry Potter, Santa Clause and Jesus do is conceptually coherent. Jesus didn't turn water into square circles!

Watch this: The Relativity of Wrong - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tcOi9a3-B0

First of all, you cannot think when and about what you want. Same as you cannot want what you want. This leads to an infinite recursion. No system can understand itself for that the very understanding would evade itself forever. A bin trying to contain itself. Anyway, there is no reason to go beyond physical, factual inquiry right now. You can assess your data with practicability. If a drug makes you think that you can fly you can jump from the next bridge and be brought back down to earth by reality. Reality is not subject to interpretation, only description and abstraction. The fundamental nature of reality, its characteristics and qualities are absolute. Red is always red even when you call it green. You don't have to have a comprehensive grasp to determine the simplest of all conclusions: Something exists or it doesn't. Either something is tangible or it doesn't exist. My definition of subsistence is for something to have an influence on me. This also implies that something that exists can be subject to scientific inquiry. Something that exists can be assessed with practicability. It makes a difference. If I cut my throat I may discover that I was dreaming or that I have been playing some advanced virtual reality game all along. Everything is possible. But right now there are safer and more promising options of gaining knowledge. How can I be sure? I can't, but there is evidence which proved to be reliable so far. I have to suspect that it will continue to be reliable based on experiment and observation. That doesn't make it the ultimate way of knowing or even a superior way but the best I know of at this time. And until I hit some hard barrier I do not have any good reason to try something else.

Supernatural free will doesn't exist. If your concept of free will requires it to be supernatural (mine doesn't) and you are sure you experience free will clearly there is something wrong with either your concept or your perception.

Whatever the conclusion here, it will not be attained by ninja'ing "everybody's perceptions" into natural law. Everybody perceives that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. Everybody perceives that squares A and B are different colours. Do I need to recite the whole litany? We aren't Aristotelians or apologists or something, we don't get to do philosophy just by sitting back in our armchairs and imagining how the world "must" obviously be. You have to actually go and look at the world. Hence our "faith" in the lab.

"Since absolutely no one has ever come up with anything even approaching a plausible naturalistic explanation of the origin of life from non-life, the obvious truth is that the first DNA based bacterium (the simplest life form we know of) with it's staggeringly functionally complex digital code was created by a supernatural intelligence." Even if your antecedent were correct (and it definitely isn't), this a textbook fallacy. There's a danger in posting comments like that ... they make it clear that IDiots are arguing in bad faith.

moedavid, Darwininan evolution is relevant from the moment you have anything that replicates itself - any of the hypothesized simpler replicators would have been subject to the same process of selection-by-survival that drives the evolution of modern life forms. It's a mistake to look at modern bacteria as if they were the first life on Earth. A modern bacterium is the product of billions of years of evolutionary refinement, and the short lifespans of many bacteria mean that they can cram more evolutionary iterations into that time than more long-lived organisms can. They may well be genetically further away from the First Cell than we are. Also, there is a big leap from 'we haven't been able to determine the exact naturalistic mechanism by which DNA life evolved' to 'therefore it was created by intelligence', and another big leap from 'it was created by intelligence' to 'it was created by supernatural intelligence'.

I think I understand the point you are trying to make with this. The questions I have in response are these: * When does Darwiniain Evolution become relevant for the discussion of life as we know it? * Where does your theory of supernatural creation stop and natural cause and effect take over? * If I were able to study, examine, and see the original supernatural creation of life, would I be able to explain it naturally? In other words, did the supernatural creator use already existing natural components and processes? Or did it create new components and processes? Or... ? * If I were able to replicate the supernatural phenomena of creation using natural components could would this be evidence for or against your theory of supernatural creation? You talk about DNA, replication, bacterium and other complicated terms. I don't know anything about these terms so I am not able to debate you on the particulars. The questions above are not a challenge. They are intended to clarify what you meant in terms I can understand.

Uhh, no. Even if we granted your shaky-as-an-aspen-leaf premise, that conclusion does not follow. "I'm ignorant of X, therefore god did X." If you want to show that a self-replicating molecule cannot possibly form from less complicated molecules in a gradual process, be my guest. Make sure to send me a copy of the paper.