Here we go again.
There’s my inference to the best explanation.
By person I meant any entity that can choose that is to say enact its will on matter. But you’re right I should have spelled that out.
agree mostly
Since you don’t bother to justify your claim I won’t comment.
It doesn’t appear that you finished reading the book. What you site is the least sophisticated definition of “nothing” that Krauss uses, and he points to it simply because, up until the 20th Century, this definition of “nothing” was as advanced a definition as anyone had. He goes on further to discuss “nothing” as might be defined in the total absence of space-time, and then goes even further to define “nothing” as the absence of any physical laws from which space-time might take shape. In all three instances Krauss succeeds in showing how modern physics demonstrates the plausibility of having the universe, as we know it, spring from “nothing”, nullifying the need for a creator.
This still does not strictly rule out a Creator, and I have no problem with people who want to believe in such a deity. I just wish people like Kyle could accept that, although such a concept fits their perception of how things should work, there is no actual scientific support for the opinion.
A) To “exhibit planning”, since planning involves pre-thought and design, evidence displaying prior intent must be shown.
Since the BB is (falsely) presumed to be the very beginning, there can be no prior intent and certainly no evidence dating prior to the event. My complaint is merely that one cannot validly say that the BB itself “exhibits planning”. Intelligence being involved is separate issue to the exhibition of planning contained within the BB itself.
B) One cannot conclude on the afore stated premises that chance didn’t cause the planning or the intelligence. And therefore cannot conclude that chance didn’t cause the BB.
C) The assertion that what is not due to chance must necessarily be due to intelligence requires support. “Intelligence” must be carefully defined and well as “chance”.
Why don’t you prove you understood the book and show how Krauss “succeeds in showing how modern physics demonstrates the plausibility of having the universe, as we know it, spring from “nothing”, nullifying the need for a creator.” Right now, you are just begging the question that K has succeeded. This is yet further proof that you don’t understand what an argument is.
More evidence that you don’t understand what a rational argument is. You’re just begging the question that there is no scientific support for a creator. Have you heard of the argument from fine tuning?
I want to hear from you why you think it is more reasonable to believe that chance is a better explanation for fine-tuning than intelligence.
Btw,
Chance isn’t a Cause. It is a aberrant state. Chance isn’t a force such as to cause anything. It is a probability issue which always and only stems merely from what is NOT known (from ignorance); "Since I don’t know what is causing option A and there are 3 options seemingly equal in causal factors, the CHANCE of A is 33%". The CAUSE of A is necessarily not known, else chance has nothing to do with it.
Thus, by such understanding, it can be concluded that Chance (nor Randomness) certainly did NOT cause the BB (or anything else).
And now you sound exactly like one of those Creationist ID types who cannot accept that natural selection is not “chance”.
False. To find out if the pyramids are planned, that is to say not built by erosion, all we need to know is that they are sufficiently improbable to know that intelligence built them. We don’t know what the prior intention was. There is a room in the Smithsonian devoted to artifacts whose purpose we are unaware of, but we still know they are artifacts.
What evidence do you have?
You’re just begging the question here.
False. Intelligence and planning are practically synonymous. You can’t have planning without intelligence and vice versa.
B) One cannot conclude on the afore stated premises that chance didn’t cause the planning or the intelligence. And therefore cannot conclude that chance didn’t cause the BB.
Intentional and accidental are binary terms. What is not accidental is intentional, what is not intentional is accidental. What is intentional is intelligent, what is accidental is due to chance. It’s basic langauge analysis. For a definition of intelligence I will cite the atheists social scientist Steven Pinker:
We know the BB is due to intelligence because the 20 or so parameters of the standard model are all tuned into the a narrow range that permits life. When you see 20 unrelated things pointing to one thing then the best explanation of that is intelligence, not chance. Not only are they fine-tuned for life, they are also fine-tuned for matter. It’s very hard to get matter to hold together.
Disagree. Evolution is an intelligent, non-accidental process of self organization, without intent or purpose.
It seems to me this quotation from Pinker works against your point in that he shows that it can sometimes be impossible to recognize intelligence for what it is without assuming some frame of reference. The funny thing is that theists often make use of a version of this principle to wave away questions as to why a benevolent God would allow the existence of evil (we cannot know the mind of God; He works in mysterious ways).
These parameters are anything but unrelated. And we really have no objective criterion for determining how improbable the universe is - we only have strong physical evidence for the existence of a single universe; the very best estimate we have is 1 for 1 = 100% likely.
False. “Planning” is a verb. It indicates action which indicates time being passed, whether by intelligence or not.
The very first event cannot come to be by evidentury planning, because the evidence would have to exist before the event that was planned. Time to plan would have to have already taken place.
That is not to say that the BB did not come from intelligence, but rather that there can be no evidence specifically concerning planning, the action of making plans. The pyramids do not exhibit planning either. We deduce that they were planned in part because we axiomatically believe that time existed before the pyramids and thus accept as high probability that they were planned.
Deducing that intelligence was involved has nothing to do with deducing “planning”, although the reverse would not be true. If one deduces that planning was involved, then one can conclude that intelligence was involved. But in the case of the original event, there can be no evidence of planning regardless of any evidence of intelligence.
Evidence of what?
False, as explained above. You can have intelligence without planning, but you can’t have planning without intelligence. Just because I have intelligence does not mean that I have made plans. Just because there is evidence of my intelligence does not mean there is evidence that I made plans. Where are the plans? Concerning the BB, where are the plans. What evidence do you have that plans were made in advance? The plan is a product of the intelligence, not the intelligence that made the plan.
Not true.
Chance does not cause accidents. It is a state that allows for accidents to occur. “There is a chance (a possibility) that an accident will occur.”
That is NOT a definition. He was speaking of indications and implications. His statement that intelligence requires a goal in order to enact or manifest is correct. But that has nothing to do with the logic involved concerning plans being made and evidenced.
Discovering a design, does not indicate intelligence in and of itself unless that design is extremely different than the norm. But even that is only an indication, not a certainty.
It also permits a great variety of other things. So no, fine-tuning does not substantiate the case of intelligence unless the same principles specifically disallow for much else. Given 10,000 undesigned events, it is likely that one of them will be a design, such as the form in the clouds or the face in the Moon.
Note you said “pointing toward one thing”. If that one thing were the only thing, if it was truly only one, you would have a case, as stated prior. But those principles do not merely point to one thing, no where near merely one thing.
I happen to know exactly what holds matter together. It isn’t as complicated as you seem to think, from my stand point anyway. But it certainly isn’t “chance”.
You have committed the fallacy of missing the point. The structure of your argument is as follows:
The fact that we cannot always distinguish chance from intelligence does not prove that the BB is accidental. You have also committed the fallacy of composition which states
where x is intelligence, y is chance and z is the Big Bang
I dealt with the argument from Evil in a post above. You probably didn’t read it because you suffered from too much cognitive dissonance and are unable to read your opponents views.
False, change any one of the parameters a little usually less than one part in 20 orders of magnitude, and life becomes impossible. They are related in that they are all set to permit the existence of life. Further, you simply begged the question that they are unrelated.
You have again committed the fallacy of missing the point. At issue here is whether or not atheism or theism is more plausible. Your argument has the following structure.
You also have a argument from ignorance, in that you go from ignorance in your first premise, to knowledge in your conclusion. At best you have an argument for agnosticism, not atheism.
We are not trying to establish that the Big Bang was designed beyond all shadow of a doubt we are merely assessing whether the evidence renders atheism or theism more plausible. The atheists have no evidence, the theists can point to the fact that the laws of nature were set with a purpose, namely, the creation of life.
This is an argument from ignorance and hence invalid.
Disagree. Evolution is an intelligent, non-accidental process of self organization, without intent or purpose.
Evolution is the most ridiculously false theory to have gained widespread acceptance in the scientific community for longer than 70 years. (The acceptance of Natural Selection as the cause of evolution has only gained currency since about 1940). First, natural selection is a useless tautology, it merely says, those who are fit to reproduce will reproduce. Therefore, species are not designed. It’s amazing that the scientific community has been duped by this absurd logic. Moreover, there is widespread discontent in the scientific community for Darwin’s theory, though that discontent does not necessarily translate into support for ID.
Second, it is quite easy for a layman to understand just how astronomical the math stands against Darwinism. Moreover, the replies from Darwinists to the math argument are quite easy to refute. Here, for example, is the most detailed mathematical calculus I have ever seen from a Darwinist. This is John Maynard Smith writing in 2001:
Occasionally someone, often a mathematician, will announce that there has not been time since the origin of the Earth for natural selection to produce the astonishing diversity and complexity we see. The odd thing about these assertions is that, although they sound quantitative, they never tell us by how much the time would have to be increased: twice as much, or a million times, or what? The only way I know to give a quantitative answer is to point out that if one estimates, however roughly, the quantity of information in the genome, and the quantity that could have been programmed by selection in 5 billion years, there has been plenty of time. If, remembering that for most of the time our ancestors were microbes, we allow an average of 20 generations a year, there has been time for selection to program the genome ten times over.
There are several problems with the above calculation. There is no mention of mutation rates, no mention of how difficult it is to sequence a functional protein de novo, no mention of how many organisms have inhabited the Earth since its inception, nor any mention of how long it would take a newly formed protein to spread through a population. Mathematics has been rigorously applied to Darwinism, ironically it has only been applied to a very narrow section of it. If one looks through the pages of a population genetics textbook, one will find that the entire focus is on the frequency of alleles and how long it takes to force bad alleles out of the population. Alleles are proteins that are already built, population genetics is completely silent regarding the odds of Natural Selection actually constructing a brand new gene from scratch. Further, we have the codiscoverer of DNA, Francis Crick, as related by Daniel Dennett on record as calling the whole profession of population genetics unscientific:
I once got in a debate with Francis Crick about the virtues and vices of Connectionism … I was curious to know how widely he would cast his denunciation. Would he say the same thing about population geneticists? The derogatory term for some of their models is “bean-bag genetics,” … Is their research good science? Crick replied that he had himself thought about the comparison, and had to say that population genetics wasn’t science either!
So as to illustrate the mathematical challenges to Darwinism let me quote Oxford University, which is aware of the mathematical problems of Darwinism and is searching for two mathematicians to shore up the theory's foundations:
The concept of fitness optimization is routinely used by field biologists, and first-year biology undergraduates are frequently taught that natural selection leads to organisms that maximize their fitness. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) promoted a conceptual integration of modern evolutionary theory in which genes are viewed as optimising agents, which is extremely influential and widespread today and encompasses inclusive fitness theory and evolutionarily stable strategies as well as general optimality ideas. However, mathematical population geneticists mainly deny that natural selection leads to optimization of any useful kind. This fifty-year old schism is intellectually damaging in itself, and has prevented improvements in our concept of what fitness is.
Intelligent Design math is much more detailed than the math that John Maynard Smith presents. The most important number to think about is 10^150. This is Williams Dembski's universal probability bound, viz. anything whose odds are above this number will not happen, for example, say you're trying to hit a lottery whose odds are one in a trillion. If one has only 100 tries to reach this number, then it is irrational to expect success and any success would be immediately suspected of foul play. Similarly, we can actually calculate how many events have occurred in our universe's history. This is arrived at by calculating the number of particles in the universe 10^80 and the amount of time, 10^26 seconds, and the number of divisions of a second, 10^44, if one accepts the Planck Time as the shortest measurement of time, even though this number now stands just beyond our experimental reach. So 10^80 particles reacting during each Planck Time in the history of our universe, an extremely absurd picture, the real number is much lower, would equal 10^150. As we will soon see, Darwinism must routinely surmount odds far beyond the universal probability bound of 10^150.
What the Darwinists claim is that immense probabilities can be broken into manageable steps, Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable, is a case in point. However, it will soon be shown that breaking horrific odds into discrete, easy steps simply can't be done. The smallest functioning biological unit is the protein, without proteins the organism cannot function. These are fabulously complex machines of enormous precision. A protein is composed of 20 different amino acids, strung together in chains of about 150 in unicellular organisms, and 450 in humans, though it is not uncommon to find some stretching as long as 1,200 or even 34,350, as is this case with the protein Titin, or 35,213 in the mouse homolog.
The odds of spontaneously assembling one protein of 150 amino acid residues from scratch are therefore 20^150 which is 10^194, well beyond the universal probability bound. The problems get even worse when we factor in that one protein by itself does nothing, but must instead work in teams of 10 or 20. The ribosome, for example, is composed of 31 proteins in some prokaryotes and I think around 50 in humans, moreover, it requires a team of about 200 proteins just to manufacture the ribosome. So what are the odds of getting 31 proteins to work together? Assuming each protein is on average 150 amino acids residues long, that's 20^150*31, or 10^6014.
There are problems with these calculations, namely, there are more than one ways to skin a cat. Darwinists love to point this out and it is a fair objection. It is a fact that there are several different ways to build a ribosome, the question is how many. 100? 1000? even if there are 10^20 different ways to form a ribosome that still leaves the odds of forming one from scratch at 10^5094. We simply do not have enough time or resources to test all 10^5094 possible sequences and find out which ones result in a functioning ribosome. Douglas Axe has attempted to calculate just how much error tolerance proteins can withstand before they lose their function. The number he arrived at was 10^78, viz. roughly 70% of the amino acids in a protein have to be exactly correct. He did this by altering already existing proteins and seeing how long it took before they fell apart. However, as I have already stated, since Axe is an ID proponent, his work is immediately out of bounds and disqualified since Darwinists do not accept evidence from scientists who deny the hard core of evolutionary theory, they will consider it and attempt to refute it, but they usually simply dismiss it out of hand. Therefore, we must turn to evidence that Darwinists will accept. There are certain regions of the genome which are called ultra conserved regions. These are large areas which are exactly the same in species which are thought to have shared a common ancestor more than 100 million years ago and they occur in the noncoding regions of the genome. "There are 481 segments longer than 200 base pairs (bp) that are absolutely conserved (100% identity with no insertions or deletions) between orthologous regions of the human, rat, and mouse genomes. Nearly all of these segments are also conserved in the chicken and dog genomes, with an average of 95 and 99% identity, respectively. Many are also significantly conserved in fish." Proteins can also be extremely conserved across species. The histone, for example, is the spool around which DNA winds. It coils DNA up 40,000 times tighter. It was clearly built with the foresight that DNA would wind around it, something Natural Selection does not have. The H4 histone is composed of 102 amino acid residues and in species as diverse as the snow pea and the cow only two amino acids are different.
All this points to a high specificity of proteins. As I said before the smallest biological unit is a protein and although we can only come up with rough estimates at their probability, common sense can provide us with substantial evidence that they are remarkably rare. Some scientists are guessing that the total number of possible functional proteins is about 10^8, even if that number is off by ten orders of magnitude that is still a far cry from, 20^1000 or 10^1300 the number of possible proteins containing one thousand amino acids. The odds of stumbling across a functional protein in a sea of all possible proteins is 1 in 10^1300-20 or 10^1280.
footnotes
Here’s something nobody else has brought up: if it’s so remarkable that the parameters are fine-tuned for us, what about the fact that it’s not MORE fine-tuned for us? I mean, we could easily conceive of a world actually better suited for us, right?
The fact that the parameters are within acceptable limits for human existence is easily accounted for with or without god, but the fact that the parameters aren’t exactly PERFECT for us is better explained without.
That matter is fine-tuned is very easy to demonstrate here are some quotes from Leonard Susskind: If photons were to be suddenly eliminated from the list of elementary particles, every atom would instantly disintegrate… When we combine the theory of elementary particles with the theory of gravity, we discover the horror of a cosmological constant big enough to not only destroy galaxies, stars, and planets but also atoms, and even protons and neutrons — unless. Unless what? Unless the various bosons, fermions, masses, and coupling constants that go into calculating the vacuum energy conspire to cancel the first 119 decimal places … If it were as easy to ‘switch on” the Higgs field as it is to switch on the magnetic field, we could change the mass of the electron at will. Increasing the mass would cause the atomic electrons to be pulled closer to the nucleus and would dramatically change chemistry. The masses of quarks that comprise the proton and neutron would increase and modify the properties of nuclei, at some point destroying them entirely. Even more disruptive, shifting the Higgs field in the other direction would eliminate the mass of the electron altogether. The electron would become so light that it couldn’t be contained within the atom. … If the universe had started out much lumpier than it did, instead of the hydrogen and helium condensing into galaxies, it would have clumped into black holes. All matter would have fallen into these black holes and been crushed under the tremendously powerful forces deep in the black hole interiors. On the other hand, if the early universe had been too smooth, it wouldn’t have clumped at all.
Paul Davies addresses this question in his book the Goldilocks Enigma though the second edition I think goes by the name of the Cosmic Jackpot. In short, he says that the cosmological constant appears to be about 1/10th more fine-tuned than it should be but that it is too early to tell.
That’s not as strong of an answer as you seem to think it is. That’s just one variable being better for us than the required value for that variable. It doesn’t talk about all the other variables, how far off they are, and how clearly unoptimized this planet is for human life – for fuck’s sake, 70% of the surface isn’t even land, not to mention the scorching hot, dry deserts and the freezing cold parts of the world. If less than 30% of a planet’s surface is inhabitable by my species, can I really say that this planet was made for me? That’s a stretch if ya ask me.
Number 1, I didn’t say that Davies’ text supported my position, in fact it doesn’t. Number two, the ratio of land to ocean has to be carefully fine-tuned but only within about 10%
Brownee in his book Rare Earth lays it out for us:
Moreover, you’ve basically allowed unchallenged my numerous claims against atheism.
Let’s suppose that the Earth was 70% land and 30% water. The resulting environment would produce a different set of plants and animals through the process of evolution. Then an intelligent inhabitant may come to the conclusion that the Earth is perfectly tuned for life … their life.
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Number one, you obviously didn’t read this post of mine which deals with evolution viewtopic.php?f=4&t=178871&start=25#p2306091
Two, you’re just begging the question that species change by means of NS acting on RM.
Three, you have an argument from ignorance going here: you don’t know that a planet can exist with 30% water and 70% land. So you’re going straight from ignorance to knowledge:
In any case, it’s hardly relevant to this discussion. You’ve virtually failed to seriously engage my ideas. You’re missing my central thesis by a wide mark.
Kyle, whether your conclusion is right or not, you are simply making too many mistakes in your logic and reasoning.
James, it is you that are making mistakes, not me. Just about everything you’ve said is wrong. Moreover, you’ve demonstrated your inability to engage with my ideas in that you virtually left unanswered my entire first post. Second, you’re contradicting yourself, if I’m making too many mistakes, then there is no possibility of me being right, so the structure of your argument is as follows:
where A is I’m right.