Thanks, as a former human physiology college teacher I had long ago placed my undergraduate and graduate school “facts” in a cellar buried deep in my (and everyone else’s) immensely complex brain and renewed the faith of my childhood and marveled that it bloomed so much that when I had the opportunity to retire at the age of 47, I took it and became a Lutheran Pastor. Now in retirement from ministry, I take my 2 vocations and share them with anyone who will listen! What a great life!
I don't know if this falls under teleology or enormity, but what always amazes me is how the scale of the universe greatly exceeds what the human brain is capable of truly understanding, and yet the universe is still comprehensible. Our mental capacity compared to God is like a single molecule compared to the entire universe. But that tiny amount is enough for us to discover amazing wonders because of how the universe is designed.
Thanks Sarah. I recently finished reading A Short History of Everything V2.0 by Bill Bryson. (late to the party I know) The thing that struck me across all the sciences touched on like cosmology, geology, biology etc was the similar sense of how phenomenally complex & intertwined our universe is, and how utterly improbable that it is that all we are came about by endless random chance.
I once did a research collaboration with a Big Data analyst, and I think a lot of the principles of computing further supports argument for theism over atheism.
Skeptics often claim that "science disprove miracles" because... they never observe it happen naturally? They haven't been able to reproduce the miracles in the lab? But much of scientific work involves manufacturing processes that will never occur naturally (e.g. medicine, engineering, genetic modification, molecular transformations, etc.), while not knowing the variables that will enable the process doesn't prove its impossibility. In fact, researchers achieving things that was previously thought impossible is how we get scientific breakthroughs.
Anyway, a programmer can write code that produces outputs the program itself cannot generate through its normal operations, and as long as the code doesn't violate the established programming language's rules, nothing is impossible. So if we already accept that a Creator made the entire universe from nothing, accepting that He can interfere with nature in small, local scales (i.e. miracles) is actually the less extraordinary proposition.
By contrast, the atheistic framework assumes that everything came to be via gradual self-organization: simple chemicals producing larger molecules with self-replicating and error-correction mechanisms that accumulate complexity to generate function, eventually producing consciousness. In a computer science framework, this is like saying that a hardware can construct its own operating system, which then wrote its own programming language, which then wrote its own application, which then wrote their own user interface.
"Anyway, a programmer can write code that produces outputs the program itself cannot generate through its normal operations"
Sorry, what? What are you talking about?
Your second paragraph seems to hand-wave miracles into existence. You're correct that we can't prove things DON'T exist, but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
As for the last paragraph: you clearly are more interested in computers than in biology. We have pretty clear fossil records of how MANY species evolved, at least, and DNA evidence shows how basic genes are conserved, so that Saccharomyces cerevisiae (common yeast) has about 23% genes with orthologs/homologs in humans. The percentages go up the further you go up the complexity ladder.
Just because different stuff share similar composition, doesn't mean one evolve from the other. It can simply mean that the more complex beings have similar functions that require shared genes.
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," I agree.
And because nature is far more complex than anything humans have ever produced, I find the claim that all of it can arise from blind, mindless processes to be the more extraordinary than the miracle claims of the Scriptures.
Although I myself don’t read a book just because someone I disagree with said to read it: “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” might prove interesting. It deals with precisely this issue.
Evolution based on changed environments has been observed on human timescales, in 10 generations or fewer. We’ve seen it in animals, e.g. birds who evolved to a darker color to match the polluted London skies.
So if you realize that a million years is 10,000 human generations, and 10 or 20 times that for animals or plants, and we’re talking about 100’s of millions of years, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
Especially since it isn’t a “random mindless process,” as you put it. A trait that gives even a 1% survival advantage will very quickly take over the whole population. We have also observed that.
However, neither of us is going to convince the other. Why not just drop it here?
I actually just addressed this very issue somewhere down this thread.
Bottom line is, from a purely empirical framework, observing that "animals undergo minor feature change (e.g. color, wing/beak shape, etc.) due to environmental pressure" and then concluding that "therefore, all species emerge from single-celled organisms through a similar mechanism" is not a legitimate extrapolation. It's a leap of faith.
A process working in small scale doesn't realistically mean they would work in larger scale with just enough time. In fact, they often don't, and failure in scaling up is where most scientific proof-of-concepts die. We have entire fields of studies to mitigate these failure risks that emerge as the process size increases.
But yes, let's just stick to our own belief systems and agree to disagree.
I could ask AI to give me a list of all the debates and books that have been produced in the last 160 years on this topic. But so could you.
Everything I could say, someone with far more academic credentials has already said. So I see no need to spend hours researching all that just so I can write something here.
This @Derek guy IS apparently up for it. So have fun, you two.
what do you think would happen if you aggregate millions of minor changes over millions of generations across millions of different organisms? Is it not plausible that you will see hugely varying lifeforms? Is that really less plausible than the alternative that those myriad lifeforms were not only created from scratch by an invisible intelligence but that all the intermediate forms that suggest evolution were created from scratch as well?
Yes, I consider "millions of undirected minor changes aggregated across millions of years" to be less plausible than the intelligent design argument the same way I consider the Infinite Monkey Theory to be an absurd explanation to account for the writings attributed to William Shakespeare. I'd rather believe that a person named William Shakespeare actually existed to produce those writings.
I used to work in science research, so I know full well that observational science come with uncertainty that widens with compounding rate the further you go from your observed data. The gap between the minor changes observed within a single species (e.g. finch beak adaptation, Drosophila wing adaptation, human height difference between ) and the "microbe to man" conclusion is so far beyond the acceptable range of extrapolation that it's pretty much a leap of faith. The former does not involve an increase of genetic complexity (and is actually reversible) required for the latter, and the question of how complexity/consciousness level actually increase is something the theory of evolution doesn't actually prove.
When it comes to the experimental design, the in-between stages might not have to be built entirely from scratch, but the knowledge needed to scale up a basic chemistry process (i.e. thermodynamics, mass-energy balance, heat transfer, engineering math, etc.) is far more advanced than anything you can learn in basic chemistry. The logic that consciousness level increases due to the increasing complexity of molecular life stages is therefore completely backwards as an explanation. The higher consciousness level is needed for the evolutionary stages to progress. It cannot be explained by it.
Do you accept that, when looking at the living world, from viruses, through bacteria, fungi, worms, beetles, lizards, birds, apes etc. That we see an increase in brain complexity and eventually the emergence of different levels of what we would understand as “consciousness”?
I accept that there is a different levels of "consciousness" among different kinds of creatures. That doesn't prove that the simpler creature evolved into the more complex ones over time. It just shows that different levels of consciousness currently exists.
A simple "Hello, World!" JavaScript is never going to gradually evolve into Minecraft on its own.
The Theory of Evolution is a theory, not an established fact or scientific law. It doesn't translate into a fact, but can help to illuminate factual observations, such as small genetic changes in a species over time.
It can certainly try to explain the observed fact, but it's definitely not the only possible explanation for it. Presuming the framework is even needed, it's not actually that convincing.
But it is a sufficient explanation for the diversity of life that we see and the capabilities and characteristics they display. You can of course posit a creator god but that just leaves you with the additional problem of defining and explaining that god, a necessarily even more complicated being than the simple process it seeks to explain. You are no further forward.
Reality is not simple. Just because an explanation works in theory, doesn't mean it actually can work in practice. A process that can work at a gram scale does not necessarily work in a kilogram scale, and claiming the latter requires independent verification, not merely assumed from the former's feasibility.
Extrapolating a conclusion so far beyond the observed data is scientifically invalid. Based on that principle, the observation that "finch beak can change over time due to environmental pressure" cannot be legitimately used to prove "evolution of humans from hydrogen fusion".
"Well, it could happen if there's enough time" is not something that has been empirically proven, so that's a statement of faith, not science.
The computer code analogy doesn’t really work. Java script was designed. Minecraft was designed. They both require human invention in the first place and human intervention for their practical application.
The start of life is concerned with the self-organising nature of chemicals arising from trillions of interactions of trillions of compounds over billions of years and under trillions of condition combinations with no end-point. Computer science it isn’t.
Unless you think that all life was created from scratch (and if you do, you are indulging in circular reasoning) then we do indeed see an early earth with simple life forms. The theory of evolution proposes that useful hereditary traits will be passed on. These can be purely physical or behavioural. This includes brain structure and capabilities of which consciousness is just one. If you accept finch beak adaptation, it is no leap at all to imagine a similar evolution of consciousness. It perfectly explains the spread of consciousness-levels in the creatures of the world today.
The start of life is concerned with the self-organising nature of chemicals arising from trillions of interactions of trillions of compounds over billions of years and under trillions of condition combinations with no end-point. < that cosmological history is an assumption that you have to actually defend rather than treat as a given because the structural evidence is not as strong as many claim it is. The spread of consciousness levels we see today can be explained by gradual evolution through random mutation or intelligent design, and you would have to justify why the former is more believable than the latter.
Given the programmer analogy, the assertion that blind processes can produce the level of information complexity we see today without intelligent guidance is actually the more absurd than simply believing that there is a Creator who designed it.
A series of endless mechanical or physical processes with no discernable design goal or end-point would never develop the mechanism to differentiate between and correct error from non-error, which is the only way any increase of complexity can occur. You don't get a Beethoven-level symphony by banging your fingers randomly on a piano, and never will.
Actual emergence of increasing consciousness level has never actually been observed in nature - drawing that inference from finch beak adaptation is an extrapolation of an unwarranted magnitude that it's essentially non-sequitur. Having an app that allows for internal variation because there is domesticated randomness coded in the architecture - e.g. random monster spawn rates in Minecraft - is not an evidence that the simple "Hello World" script would be capable of transforming into something as complex as Minecraft without a programmer working on it.
yes, my description of how life may have started is a hypothesis. It may not have happened like that. What we do know from observing the universe around us now is that the early earth had all of those things. (chemical interactions, time, conditions etc.) And plausible (though unproved) mechanisms for how self-replicating life may have first arisen have been posited, none of which rely upon anything outside of the natural world we observe.
Sure, intelligent design can be put forward as an explanation but it simply gets you no further forward. In fact it then relies upon you not only explaining how the physical world works, but also how this supposed creating intelligence came to be. It is the ultimate can-kicking exercise.
The informational complexity present in living things (which I assume you are referring to) is highly wasteful and inefficient in many ways. Exactly what one would expect to see in a evolutionary process. You posit a creator, in which case it is a fairly incompetent one. It could be true but why suggest an additional level of complexity when none is needed? You assert that blind processes cannot bring about complexity and yet the mechanisms of evolution beautifully and elegantly show how this can happen.
You talk about the inability of processes to differentiate between error and non-error. That’s the wrong terminology. The world differentiates between useful and non-useful (or detrimental, or wasteful) by organisms failing to reproduce and so failing to pass on their genetic information.
That is it, that is all that is required for information and complexity to flourish.
And you have to completely forget about end-points or goals. Evolution has no such thing. We can marvel at how incredible we are and how unlikely our adaptations but that only works if you assume that we are how were always meant to be. That’s the wrong thinking. The apex thinker on the earth (with enough consciousness to consider such matters) could easily have been some sort of corvid, or a cetaecean rather than an ape.
As to your last point. The almost unfathomably long time scales involved in the evolution of major features and capabilities mean that we are unlikely to observes any major changes directly. But of course by your own reasoning no intelligent creator has ever been observed either.
Also, cerebral adaptations are no more of a challenge to the evolutionary theory than beak adaptation. Brain structure is genetically coded as are beaks. New capabilities arise for both beak and brain through mutation and where they are useful, they stand a better chance of being retained by future generations. Again, this is beautifully simple and requires no guiding hand.
Intelligent creator having never been observed in nature is actually consistent with the computing analogy. Expected, even. Front end users never see the back-end processes until it produces a visible output, and not every piece of code have visible outcomes. If you ever serve as a mod or an admin to a game, or even a website, you know they have access to parts of program that is completely invisible to regular users (Developer Mode, if you will), and can make changes to functions that they might not notice until the staff post a changelog announcement, or the user try to use the function that got changed.
Whereas analogies that evolutionists use to explain unguided processes implicitly smuggle intelligent-like capabilities that they try to deny. The scaling up assumption from finch beak to the "pond slime to humans" evolution does not work if you actually work in science/engineering. A process that's achievable in a laboratory scale don't naturally translate into a full industrial mass-production scale (which has a much greater complexity) without additional, conscious long-term planning. The trajectory from a lab to pilot plant to small industry to global mass production is not something you can extrapolate by assumption. Each stage introduce increasing failure modes that requires increasingly complex intelligence to anticipate and resolve. Intelligence that you're trying to explain away by incompatible comparisons.
I suppose we can debate analogies forever, but at the end of the day "unguided evolution" vs. "intelligent design" framework to explain current observable nature is a theoretical commitment. A scientific philosophy, not empirical data.
For me it was studying evolution. When I reached the supposed evolution of whales back in the 1970's, the utter ridiculousness of the theory made it clear to me that some kind of God had to be behind it all.
This was an interesting read, no question… However, it never actually offers five science-based reasons to believe in God. What it offers is five places where the author feels wonder, contingency, or explanatory pressure, and then interprets those feelings and pressures through a theistic lens. It mistakes anthropic selection for purpose, human awe for evidence, unresolved cosmology for theism, and a contested metaphysical argument for a scientific conclusion.
Don’t get me wrong, that is a completely legitimate personal worldview. But it is not the same thing as a scientific inference, because in every case herein the gap between the data and “therefore God” is filled by controversial philosophical assumptions, not physics itself.
None of its five points uniquely favors God over the alternatives, and several of them are standard examples of how not to move from “mystery” to “design.”
"Laws of nature that don’t randomly change with time or place": seems weird to say. Like obviously! Laws of nature, as such, don't randomly change with time or place. Seems analytic, definitional. So (how) is this a scientific argument? (For theism?)
There's zero reason to assume a priori that the laws of nature wouldn't be specific to time in place in naturalism. This is especially true if you hold to the multiverse hypothesis.
Point of clarification: Who are you assuming is assuming a priori "that the laws of nature... (etc.)"?? And why do you make that assumption about whomever that is?
"And you can’t solve the problem by kicking the can down an infinite road of causes; eventually you need something eternal and self-existing." So what created the deity, and what created that, and what created that...? You just kicked the can down an infinite road of causes.
Its not that hard to understand why you think this way. Every day brings with it the realization that time is running out. You are no different than the Egyptians,Babylonians, Sumerians, Jews.... You are vastly more educated, more learned, but none the less destined to the same fate. No amount of knowledge or wealth can save you from this fate.
Can you prove that a supreme being or incredible force built the universe, a god perpetrated this incredible feat, in it's infinite glory. The answer is NO.You cannot, it is your personal belief. In the same way I cannot say that there is NO god, because I have no way prove that there is no god. It would be very very narcissistic of me to make such a claim.
Many have come before you and i dare say many many more will come after you, stating, professing, hoping and wishing the exact same things to be true.
Empirically proving or not proving God may be impossible. How 'bout reasonability? What is more reasonable based on the evidence available to us? God or no God?
No God. As I mentioned, I cannot prove that there is no God, nor do I wish to prove that there is no God. The question or the challenge is one of your own making. You say there is a God I say prove it. I will be waiting for that event. Assumptions and Reasonability wont cut it when it comes to the Supernatural.
Sometimes I wish I could prove God, but then, if I could, I think I would even be suspicious. How does a finite creature prove an infinite being that isn't an object but existence itself? I'm with you, I don't wish to prove there is a God because I would be afraid this God may be more in my image than I in his. However, I'm left with questions of how I got here, purpose, meaning, what is flourishing, etc? I find the theistic view answers them more reasonably than a non-theistic view. One example, origin - is it more reasonable to believe life started from nothing or from something? I happen to appeal to science on this and hold to the cause and effect principle. What are your thoughts?
Origin? What Origin, Whose Origin, the Origin of the Universe, Origin of man, and his religions. For yourself and billions of people of the world, the theistic view answers the question of the existence of God. Part of the reasoning that is used by believers, something that you may have noticed and witnessed is that belief in God gives purpose to their lives, im using your words here. You have drifted from scientific evidence and the domain of science to religion. Both are mutually incompatible.
Regarding origin, I was referring to the beginning of the universe in which we inhabit. Regarding the theistic view, you say that it answers the question of God. I feel the theistic view assumes the existence of God, by faith, because again I cannot empirically prove God. However, I choose this assumption because it better explains the origin of the universe. And here is where I would appeal to science with the principle of cause and effect. Moreover, I like the big bang theory. I believe God could have been the cause of this event. I feel comfortable with science and God and am not seeing the incompatibility. Perhaps, you could explain a little more of why you see them as incompatible? BTW: thanks for the discussion. :)
No no no no no. Please stop there. No where in any of the monotheist religions is there an assumption made, EVER. It is stated as a fact an indisputable fact. In many cases non belief or non compliance can be and is a death sentence. So please just stop there.
So as I write this we are back to square one. You say that you assume that a God created the Observable Universe, I say I dont believe you, provide indisputable evidence, proof of this God. You say I cant, it's based on a hunch, a guess, an assumption. That wont cut it.
The same as a faith based religion.
Faith by definition is belief in something without evidence.
Not a problem with that, only a narcissist like yourself would write what you did, especially after reading the back and forth with Chris. But hell that's Ok. Chris understood, you on the other hand.......
I will counter argue that all these other possibilities could have also existed and these universes did not get created. In this case, the probabilities have aligned and therefore we can see and live in this universe.
It is possible that there are universes with other laws and other modes of existence. It still does not require God.
Beauty is entirely subjective and can hardly be anything more than an emotional reaction. Spiders may be quite ugly to look at but belong to the same universe. You cannot cherry pick only the beautiful things to look at.
The philosophical term is contingency, meaning the universe coming into existence is contingent upon another cause., which is contingent upon another cause, etc. At some point, there is a cause that was not contingent upon anything else. That is what we would call God, the Creator. As for the beauty of the universe that others are talking about, it's the feeling of awe, something that stirs feelings of wonder deep within us. That is one of the most basic and fundamental ways it is revealed to us that there's something much greater and more intelligent than ourselves.
But the problem with contingency is that at a point of time the contingency ends. And that we can call god. In that case what is to prevent us from skipping the contingencies altogether as steps of unprovable intermediaries, and simply declare that the universe(s) came into being on its own, without any other cause?
Also….
“What came before” may be a valid question, but “who created this” isn’t. It assumes an anthropocentric viewpoint. Simply put, antecedent causes may not be conscious entities at all, even if you posit that they exist in the first place.
I am sorry, I haven’t been trained in philosophy, so these may seem to be incorrect; please explain further of these are so.
I’ve long ago given up arguing for or against the existence of God. My reasons for belief are about as unscientific as they come, and completely touchy-feely, so to speak. So, my question is not to be argumentative.
Couldn’t a few of these reasons be considered as “God of the gaps” type logic? That is, “I can’t explain it, so, it must be God.”
When archeologists encounter shards of pottery buried deep under layers of dirt, why don't they consider whether the shards were formed randomly by natural forces? Because the odds of that happening are so overwhelmingly low that by far the most reasonable inference is that the pottery was made by human hands. No one would say an archeologist is invoking a "human of the gaps" argument by doing so.
Likewise in physics, it's not that we don't have other explanations for the design, the precision, the beauty, the vastness, and the fact that anything exists finitely, it's that these phenomena are so wildly improbable on naturalism that the most reasonable inference is that something conscious and intelligent is responsible for them.
I don't think that analogy is apt. When people find shards of pottery (anywhere), they assume that they were made by people because they know what pottery is and how pottery is made. There's no even implicit reasoning that the pottery could also have been made by, say, atheist naked mole rats, but that the probability of that can be calculated to be... well, no one knows, actually, but clearly it's 'very very low,' let's just say. (wink, wink)
There is a nonzero probability that the shards could've formed by natural processes. The odds of that happening are extremely low, which is why no one seriously considers that as the best explanation.
In physics, the odds of all the 31 or so fundamental parameters of the universe being tuned to the precise values to allow conscious life are even less probable "by accident." The only other two possibilities are that this fine-tuning is necessary according to the laws of nature or that it was a design choice. There is nothing in the laws of nature that suggest these parameters must be the way they are. But process of elimination, design is the option that makes the most sense.
The problem is that we have good reason for thinking we understand pottery. We have good reason for skepticism towards physicists who claim that we understand the alleged "fine-tuning of the 31 or so fundamental parameters of the universe" and that we have grounds for assessing these probabilistically relatively to a God-hypothesis. The epistemic grounds/difficulties in the two cases appear not to be analogous.
By the way, I get annoyed with these nested comments, especially when they're in more than one place. If you'd like to continue the conversation, feel free to DM me, but I don't want to keep replying here.
I think it's quite obvious (though I don't deny that I could be naive in thinking this) that physics is bounded by the range of its own modes of conceptualization and that theophysics (so-to-speak) has no real foundation and no real status within theoretical physics proper. I think historically physics (i.e., theorists thereof) has had a lot of vain pretensions about its own capacity to deterministically explain the universe and that talk about 'fine-tuning of parameters' is more or less just a conceptual residue of those failed -- indeed, mistaken -- pretensions. Theological/philosophical speculation about physics (science) is important and interesting and tempting for physicists, but from the standpoint of physics itself not real science, dealing with questions that are not scientifically decidable.
A great summary, I would add math to the list because as Wigner and Einstein both commented, the real mystery is how the world can be comprehensible.
This is my favorite sentence from your essay:
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that it’s the handiwork of a God who is even more luxuriously, extravagantly, eye-poppingly beautiful.
Thanks, as a former human physiology college teacher I had long ago placed my undergraduate and graduate school “facts” in a cellar buried deep in my (and everyone else’s) immensely complex brain and renewed the faith of my childhood and marveled that it bloomed so much that when I had the opportunity to retire at the age of 47, I took it and became a Lutheran Pastor. Now in retirement from ministry, I take my 2 vocations and share them with anyone who will listen! What a great life!
I don't know if this falls under teleology or enormity, but what always amazes me is how the scale of the universe greatly exceeds what the human brain is capable of truly understanding, and yet the universe is still comprehensible. Our mental capacity compared to God is like a single molecule compared to the entire universe. But that tiny amount is enough for us to discover amazing wonders because of how the universe is designed.
Thanks Sarah. I recently finished reading A Short History of Everything V2.0 by Bill Bryson. (late to the party I know) The thing that struck me across all the sciences touched on like cosmology, geology, biology etc was the similar sense of how phenomenally complex & intertwined our universe is, and how utterly improbable that it is that all we are came about by endless random chance.
If we were not meant to look up at the stars then why did God make them so beautiful?
I once did a research collaboration with a Big Data analyst, and I think a lot of the principles of computing further supports argument for theism over atheism.
Skeptics often claim that "science disprove miracles" because... they never observe it happen naturally? They haven't been able to reproduce the miracles in the lab? But much of scientific work involves manufacturing processes that will never occur naturally (e.g. medicine, engineering, genetic modification, molecular transformations, etc.), while not knowing the variables that will enable the process doesn't prove its impossibility. In fact, researchers achieving things that was previously thought impossible is how we get scientific breakthroughs.
Anyway, a programmer can write code that produces outputs the program itself cannot generate through its normal operations, and as long as the code doesn't violate the established programming language's rules, nothing is impossible. So if we already accept that a Creator made the entire universe from nothing, accepting that He can interfere with nature in small, local scales (i.e. miracles) is actually the less extraordinary proposition.
By contrast, the atheistic framework assumes that everything came to be via gradual self-organization: simple chemicals producing larger molecules with self-replicating and error-correction mechanisms that accumulate complexity to generate function, eventually producing consciousness. In a computer science framework, this is like saying that a hardware can construct its own operating system, which then wrote its own programming language, which then wrote its own application, which then wrote their own user interface.
"Anyway, a programmer can write code that produces outputs the program itself cannot generate through its normal operations"
Sorry, what? What are you talking about?
Your second paragraph seems to hand-wave miracles into existence. You're correct that we can't prove things DON'T exist, but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
As for the last paragraph: you clearly are more interested in computers than in biology. We have pretty clear fossil records of how MANY species evolved, at least, and DNA evidence shows how basic genes are conserved, so that Saccharomyces cerevisiae (common yeast) has about 23% genes with orthologs/homologs in humans. The percentages go up the further you go up the complexity ladder.
Just because different stuff share similar composition, doesn't mean one evolve from the other. It can simply mean that the more complex beings have similar functions that require shared genes.
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," I agree.
And because nature is far more complex than anything humans have ever produced, I find the claim that all of it can arise from blind, mindless processes to be the more extraordinary than the miracle claims of the Scriptures.
Although I myself don’t read a book just because someone I disagree with said to read it: “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” might prove interesting. It deals with precisely this issue.
Evolution based on changed environments has been observed on human timescales, in 10 generations or fewer. We’ve seen it in animals, e.g. birds who evolved to a darker color to match the polluted London skies.
So if you realize that a million years is 10,000 human generations, and 10 or 20 times that for animals or plants, and we’re talking about 100’s of millions of years, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
Especially since it isn’t a “random mindless process,” as you put it. A trait that gives even a 1% survival advantage will very quickly take over the whole population. We have also observed that.
However, neither of us is going to convince the other. Why not just drop it here?
I actually just addressed this very issue somewhere down this thread.
Bottom line is, from a purely empirical framework, observing that "animals undergo minor feature change (e.g. color, wing/beak shape, etc.) due to environmental pressure" and then concluding that "therefore, all species emerge from single-celled organisms through a similar mechanism" is not a legitimate extrapolation. It's a leap of faith.
A process working in small scale doesn't realistically mean they would work in larger scale with just enough time. In fact, they often don't, and failure in scaling up is where most scientific proof-of-concepts die. We have entire fields of studies to mitigate these failure risks that emerge as the process size increases.
But yes, let's just stick to our own belief systems and agree to disagree.
I could ask AI to give me a list of all the debates and books that have been produced in the last 160 years on this topic. But so could you.
Everything I could say, someone with far more academic credentials has already said. So I see no need to spend hours researching all that just so I can write something here.
This @Derek guy IS apparently up for it. So have fun, you two.
what do you think would happen if you aggregate millions of minor changes over millions of generations across millions of different organisms? Is it not plausible that you will see hugely varying lifeforms? Is that really less plausible than the alternative that those myriad lifeforms were not only created from scratch by an invisible intelligence but that all the intermediate forms that suggest evolution were created from scratch as well?
Yes, I consider "millions of undirected minor changes aggregated across millions of years" to be less plausible than the intelligent design argument the same way I consider the Infinite Monkey Theory to be an absurd explanation to account for the writings attributed to William Shakespeare. I'd rather believe that a person named William Shakespeare actually existed to produce those writings.
I used to work in science research, so I know full well that observational science come with uncertainty that widens with compounding rate the further you go from your observed data. The gap between the minor changes observed within a single species (e.g. finch beak adaptation, Drosophila wing adaptation, human height difference between ) and the "microbe to man" conclusion is so far beyond the acceptable range of extrapolation that it's pretty much a leap of faith. The former does not involve an increase of genetic complexity (and is actually reversible) required for the latter, and the question of how complexity/consciousness level actually increase is something the theory of evolution doesn't actually prove.
When it comes to the experimental design, the in-between stages might not have to be built entirely from scratch, but the knowledge needed to scale up a basic chemistry process (i.e. thermodynamics, mass-energy balance, heat transfer, engineering math, etc.) is far more advanced than anything you can learn in basic chemistry. The logic that consciousness level increases due to the increasing complexity of molecular life stages is therefore completely backwards as an explanation. The higher consciousness level is needed for the evolutionary stages to progress. It cannot be explained by it.
Do you accept that, when looking at the living world, from viruses, through bacteria, fungi, worms, beetles, lizards, birds, apes etc. That we see an increase in brain complexity and eventually the emergence of different levels of what we would understand as “consciousness”?
I accept that there is a different levels of "consciousness" among different kinds of creatures. That doesn't prove that the simpler creature evolved into the more complex ones over time. It just shows that different levels of consciousness currently exists.
A simple "Hello, World!" JavaScript is never going to gradually evolve into Minecraft on its own.
The Theory of Evolution is a theory, not an established fact or scientific law. It doesn't translate into a fact, but can help to illuminate factual observations, such as small genetic changes in a species over time.
It can certainly try to explain the observed fact, but it's definitely not the only possible explanation for it. Presuming the framework is even needed, it's not actually that convincing.
But it is a sufficient explanation for the diversity of life that we see and the capabilities and characteristics they display. You can of course posit a creator god but that just leaves you with the additional problem of defining and explaining that god, a necessarily even more complicated being than the simple process it seeks to explain. You are no further forward.
Reality is not simple. Just because an explanation works in theory, doesn't mean it actually can work in practice. A process that can work at a gram scale does not necessarily work in a kilogram scale, and claiming the latter requires independent verification, not merely assumed from the former's feasibility.
Extrapolating a conclusion so far beyond the observed data is scientifically invalid. Based on that principle, the observation that "finch beak can change over time due to environmental pressure" cannot be legitimately used to prove "evolution of humans from hydrogen fusion".
"Well, it could happen if there's enough time" is not something that has been empirically proven, so that's a statement of faith, not science.
The computer code analogy doesn’t really work. Java script was designed. Minecraft was designed. They both require human invention in the first place and human intervention for their practical application.
The start of life is concerned with the self-organising nature of chemicals arising from trillions of interactions of trillions of compounds over billions of years and under trillions of condition combinations with no end-point. Computer science it isn’t.
Unless you think that all life was created from scratch (and if you do, you are indulging in circular reasoning) then we do indeed see an early earth with simple life forms. The theory of evolution proposes that useful hereditary traits will be passed on. These can be purely physical or behavioural. This includes brain structure and capabilities of which consciousness is just one. If you accept finch beak adaptation, it is no leap at all to imagine a similar evolution of consciousness. It perfectly explains the spread of consciousness-levels in the creatures of the world today.
The start of life is concerned with the self-organising nature of chemicals arising from trillions of interactions of trillions of compounds over billions of years and under trillions of condition combinations with no end-point. < that cosmological history is an assumption that you have to actually defend rather than treat as a given because the structural evidence is not as strong as many claim it is. The spread of consciousness levels we see today can be explained by gradual evolution through random mutation or intelligent design, and you would have to justify why the former is more believable than the latter.
Given the programmer analogy, the assertion that blind processes can produce the level of information complexity we see today without intelligent guidance is actually the more absurd than simply believing that there is a Creator who designed it.
A series of endless mechanical or physical processes with no discernable design goal or end-point would never develop the mechanism to differentiate between and correct error from non-error, which is the only way any increase of complexity can occur. You don't get a Beethoven-level symphony by banging your fingers randomly on a piano, and never will.
Actual emergence of increasing consciousness level has never actually been observed in nature - drawing that inference from finch beak adaptation is an extrapolation of an unwarranted magnitude that it's essentially non-sequitur. Having an app that allows for internal variation because there is domesticated randomness coded in the architecture - e.g. random monster spawn rates in Minecraft - is not an evidence that the simple "Hello World" script would be capable of transforming into something as complex as Minecraft without a programmer working on it.
yes, my description of how life may have started is a hypothesis. It may not have happened like that. What we do know from observing the universe around us now is that the early earth had all of those things. (chemical interactions, time, conditions etc.) And plausible (though unproved) mechanisms for how self-replicating life may have first arisen have been posited, none of which rely upon anything outside of the natural world we observe.
Sure, intelligent design can be put forward as an explanation but it simply gets you no further forward. In fact it then relies upon you not only explaining how the physical world works, but also how this supposed creating intelligence came to be. It is the ultimate can-kicking exercise.
The informational complexity present in living things (which I assume you are referring to) is highly wasteful and inefficient in many ways. Exactly what one would expect to see in a evolutionary process. You posit a creator, in which case it is a fairly incompetent one. It could be true but why suggest an additional level of complexity when none is needed? You assert that blind processes cannot bring about complexity and yet the mechanisms of evolution beautifully and elegantly show how this can happen.
You talk about the inability of processes to differentiate between error and non-error. That’s the wrong terminology. The world differentiates between useful and non-useful (or detrimental, or wasteful) by organisms failing to reproduce and so failing to pass on their genetic information.
That is it, that is all that is required for information and complexity to flourish.
And you have to completely forget about end-points or goals. Evolution has no such thing. We can marvel at how incredible we are and how unlikely our adaptations but that only works if you assume that we are how were always meant to be. That’s the wrong thinking. The apex thinker on the earth (with enough consciousness to consider such matters) could easily have been some sort of corvid, or a cetaecean rather than an ape.
As to your last point. The almost unfathomably long time scales involved in the evolution of major features and capabilities mean that we are unlikely to observes any major changes directly. But of course by your own reasoning no intelligent creator has ever been observed either.
Also, cerebral adaptations are no more of a challenge to the evolutionary theory than beak adaptation. Brain structure is genetically coded as are beaks. New capabilities arise for both beak and brain through mutation and where they are useful, they stand a better chance of being retained by future generations. Again, this is beautifully simple and requires no guiding hand.
Intelligent creator having never been observed in nature is actually consistent with the computing analogy. Expected, even. Front end users never see the back-end processes until it produces a visible output, and not every piece of code have visible outcomes. If you ever serve as a mod or an admin to a game, or even a website, you know they have access to parts of program that is completely invisible to regular users (Developer Mode, if you will), and can make changes to functions that they might not notice until the staff post a changelog announcement, or the user try to use the function that got changed.
Whereas analogies that evolutionists use to explain unguided processes implicitly smuggle intelligent-like capabilities that they try to deny. The scaling up assumption from finch beak to the "pond slime to humans" evolution does not work if you actually work in science/engineering. A process that's achievable in a laboratory scale don't naturally translate into a full industrial mass-production scale (which has a much greater complexity) without additional, conscious long-term planning. The trajectory from a lab to pilot plant to small industry to global mass production is not something you can extrapolate by assumption. Each stage introduce increasing failure modes that requires increasingly complex intelligence to anticipate and resolve. Intelligence that you're trying to explain away by incompatible comparisons.
I suppose we can debate analogies forever, but at the end of the day "unguided evolution" vs. "intelligent design" framework to explain current observable nature is a theoretical commitment. A scientific philosophy, not empirical data.
For me it was studying evolution. When I reached the supposed evolution of whales back in the 1970's, the utter ridiculousness of the theory made it clear to me that some kind of God had to be behind it all.
This was an interesting read, no question… However, it never actually offers five science-based reasons to believe in God. What it offers is five places where the author feels wonder, contingency, or explanatory pressure, and then interprets those feelings and pressures through a theistic lens. It mistakes anthropic selection for purpose, human awe for evidence, unresolved cosmology for theism, and a contested metaphysical argument for a scientific conclusion.
Don’t get me wrong, that is a completely legitimate personal worldview. But it is not the same thing as a scientific inference, because in every case herein the gap between the data and “therefore God” is filled by controversial philosophical assumptions, not physics itself.
None of its five points uniquely favors God over the alternatives, and several of them are standard examples of how not to move from “mystery” to “design.”
"Laws of nature that don’t randomly change with time or place": seems weird to say. Like obviously! Laws of nature, as such, don't randomly change with time or place. Seems analytic, definitional. So (how) is this a scientific argument? (For theism?)
There's zero reason to assume a priori that the laws of nature wouldn't be specific to time in place in naturalism. This is especially true if you hold to the multiverse hypothesis.
How do you define naturalism?
Point of clarification: Who are you assuming is assuming a priori "that the laws of nature... (etc.)"?? And why do you make that assumption about whomever that is?
"And you can’t solve the problem by kicking the can down an infinite road of causes; eventually you need something eternal and self-existing." So what created the deity, and what created that, and what created that...? You just kicked the can down an infinite road of causes.
Simulation theorists would make the same observations.
Beautiful! God bless you. - Love, Dr. G
Its not that hard to understand why you think this way. Every day brings with it the realization that time is running out. You are no different than the Egyptians,Babylonians, Sumerians, Jews.... You are vastly more educated, more learned, but none the less destined to the same fate. No amount of knowledge or wealth can save you from this fate.
Can you prove that a supreme being or incredible force built the universe, a god perpetrated this incredible feat, in it's infinite glory. The answer is NO.You cannot, it is your personal belief. In the same way I cannot say that there is NO god, because I have no way prove that there is no god. It would be very very narcissistic of me to make such a claim.
Many have come before you and i dare say many many more will come after you, stating, professing, hoping and wishing the exact same things to be true.
Empirically proving or not proving God may be impossible. How 'bout reasonability? What is more reasonable based on the evidence available to us? God or no God?
No God. As I mentioned, I cannot prove that there is no God, nor do I wish to prove that there is no God. The question or the challenge is one of your own making. You say there is a God I say prove it. I will be waiting for that event. Assumptions and Reasonability wont cut it when it comes to the Supernatural.
Sometimes I wish I could prove God, but then, if I could, I think I would even be suspicious. How does a finite creature prove an infinite being that isn't an object but existence itself? I'm with you, I don't wish to prove there is a God because I would be afraid this God may be more in my image than I in his. However, I'm left with questions of how I got here, purpose, meaning, what is flourishing, etc? I find the theistic view answers them more reasonably than a non-theistic view. One example, origin - is it more reasonable to believe life started from nothing or from something? I happen to appeal to science on this and hold to the cause and effect principle. What are your thoughts?
Origin? What Origin, Whose Origin, the Origin of the Universe, Origin of man, and his religions. For yourself and billions of people of the world, the theistic view answers the question of the existence of God. Part of the reasoning that is used by believers, something that you may have noticed and witnessed is that belief in God gives purpose to their lives, im using your words here. You have drifted from scientific evidence and the domain of science to religion. Both are mutually incompatible.
Regarding origin, I was referring to the beginning of the universe in which we inhabit. Regarding the theistic view, you say that it answers the question of God. I feel the theistic view assumes the existence of God, by faith, because again I cannot empirically prove God. However, I choose this assumption because it better explains the origin of the universe. And here is where I would appeal to science with the principle of cause and effect. Moreover, I like the big bang theory. I believe God could have been the cause of this event. I feel comfortable with science and God and am not seeing the incompatibility. Perhaps, you could explain a little more of why you see them as incompatible? BTW: thanks for the discussion. :)
No no no no no. Please stop there. No where in any of the monotheist religions is there an assumption made, EVER. It is stated as a fact an indisputable fact. In many cases non belief or non compliance can be and is a death sentence. So please just stop there.
So as I write this we are back to square one. You say that you assume that a God created the Observable Universe, I say I dont believe you, provide indisputable evidence, proof of this God. You say I cant, it's based on a hunch, a guess, an assumption. That wont cut it.
The same as a faith based religion.
Faith by definition is belief in something without evidence.
Case closed.
Thanks for the back and forth.
Have you read summa theologica?
Proclaiming the existence of God is not narcissism.
Written for the everyday narcissist......
So you haven't read it. Or even know what it is. Thanks for clarifying.
Not a problem with that, only a narcissist like yourself would write what you did, especially after reading the back and forth with Chris. But hell that's Ok. Chris understood, you on the other hand.......
You talk like a teenage in therapy.
The only narcissism here is what you dragged in.
Proclaiming the existence of God is humbling.
You wouldn't know anything about that..
Great you are humbled now move on.
What part did you not understand...
I will counter argue that all these other possibilities could have also existed and these universes did not get created. In this case, the probabilities have aligned and therefore we can see and live in this universe.
It is possible that there are universes with other laws and other modes of existence. It still does not require God.
Beauty is entirely subjective and can hardly be anything more than an emotional reaction. Spiders may be quite ugly to look at but belong to the same universe. You cannot cherry pick only the beautiful things to look at.
The philosophical term is contingency, meaning the universe coming into existence is contingent upon another cause., which is contingent upon another cause, etc. At some point, there is a cause that was not contingent upon anything else. That is what we would call God, the Creator. As for the beauty of the universe that others are talking about, it's the feeling of awe, something that stirs feelings of wonder deep within us. That is one of the most basic and fundamental ways it is revealed to us that there's something much greater and more intelligent than ourselves.
But the problem with contingency is that at a point of time the contingency ends. And that we can call god. In that case what is to prevent us from skipping the contingencies altogether as steps of unprovable intermediaries, and simply declare that the universe(s) came into being on its own, without any other cause?
Also….
“What came before” may be a valid question, but “who created this” isn’t. It assumes an anthropocentric viewpoint. Simply put, antecedent causes may not be conscious entities at all, even if you posit that they exist in the first place.
I am sorry, I haven’t been trained in philosophy, so these may seem to be incorrect; please explain further of these are so.
I’ve long ago given up arguing for or against the existence of God. My reasons for belief are about as unscientific as they come, and completely touchy-feely, so to speak. So, my question is not to be argumentative.
Couldn’t a few of these reasons be considered as “God of the gaps” type logic? That is, “I can’t explain it, so, it must be God.”
When archeologists encounter shards of pottery buried deep under layers of dirt, why don't they consider whether the shards were formed randomly by natural forces? Because the odds of that happening are so overwhelmingly low that by far the most reasonable inference is that the pottery was made by human hands. No one would say an archeologist is invoking a "human of the gaps" argument by doing so.
Likewise in physics, it's not that we don't have other explanations for the design, the precision, the beauty, the vastness, and the fact that anything exists finitely, it's that these phenomena are so wildly improbable on naturalism that the most reasonable inference is that something conscious and intelligent is responsible for them.
I don't think that analogy is apt. When people find shards of pottery (anywhere), they assume that they were made by people because they know what pottery is and how pottery is made. There's no even implicit reasoning that the pottery could also have been made by, say, atheist naked mole rats, but that the probability of that can be calculated to be... well, no one knows, actually, but clearly it's 'very very low,' let's just say. (wink, wink)
There is a nonzero probability that the shards could've formed by natural processes. The odds of that happening are extremely low, which is why no one seriously considers that as the best explanation.
In physics, the odds of all the 31 or so fundamental parameters of the universe being tuned to the precise values to allow conscious life are even less probable "by accident." The only other two possibilities are that this fine-tuning is necessary according to the laws of nature or that it was a design choice. There is nothing in the laws of nature that suggest these parameters must be the way they are. But process of elimination, design is the option that makes the most sense.
The problem is that we have good reason for thinking we understand pottery. We have good reason for skepticism towards physicists who claim that we understand the alleged "fine-tuning of the 31 or so fundamental parameters of the universe" and that we have grounds for assessing these probabilistically relatively to a God-hypothesis. The epistemic grounds/difficulties in the two cases appear not to be analogous.
By the way, I get annoyed with these nested comments, especially when they're in more than one place. If you'd like to continue the conversation, feel free to DM me, but I don't want to keep replying here.
Why do you think physicists don't understand these parameters very well? That feels like a cop-out to me.
I think it's quite obvious (though I don't deny that I could be naive in thinking this) that physics is bounded by the range of its own modes of conceptualization and that theophysics (so-to-speak) has no real foundation and no real status within theoretical physics proper. I think historically physics (i.e., theorists thereof) has had a lot of vain pretensions about its own capacity to deterministically explain the universe and that talk about 'fine-tuning of parameters' is more or less just a conceptual residue of those failed -- indeed, mistaken -- pretensions. Theological/philosophical speculation about physics (science) is important and interesting and tempting for physicists, but from the standpoint of physics itself not real science, dealing with questions that are not scientifically decidable.