Origins TheologyForum for the discussion of Creation Science (Young/Old) vs Theistic Evolution. Discussion of Atheistic Evolution should be taken to the Discussion and Debate forums.
I did answer. If your argument has no possible set of truth conditions then the conclusion is vacuous. My argument has a possible set of truth conditions that make it possible. That is an answer.
Yes, you answered, but your answer was wrong, and it continues to be wrong every time you repeat it. Trying to carry on a discussion with you is a little frustrating, since all you do is keep repeating the same wrong answer, without ever responding to my arguments.
Still, I will try once again. Your argument has exactly the same possible set of truth conditions as my argument. My argument requires the existence of an featherless biped when DNA originated. Your argument requires the existence of an intelligent being when DNA originated. Neither an intelligent being nor a featherless biped is known to have existed at the time, nor is there any direct evidence for the existence of either. The only known intelligent beings arose long after DNA came into existence, as did the only known featherless bipeds; in fact, they arose at the same time, because they are the same creatures.
Now, could you please tell me why your truth condition is possible and mine isn't?
This is still a red herring. Chance does govern outcomes. That is what is important. Philosophical rumination about why we observe chance is irrelevant. We have an entire discipline in mathematics describing how to quantify chance called probability theory, and we have an additional discipline in mathematics describing how to harness chance observations called statistics.
And we have an entire approach to probability and statistics, which many would argue is the only coherent interpretation of probability, wholly based on the idea that probability is a measure of our uncertainty, rather than a statement about a physical system. That's what Bayesian statistics is.
I have been pretty explicit about why I think talking about chance governing outcomes is incoherent. You have yet to give a coherent explanation of what you mean by the phrase, so simply repeating it is not going to advance your argument at all.
Like I said, it is a good example of why your conflating of necessity and chance are irrelevant, because we recognize both concepts and yet we distinguish between the two models and use probability theory to do the analysis, ergo, using the notion of necessity and chance as a way of viewing how the results in the world are produced is not an "incoherent" view. Far from it.
The first part of the paragraph is correct. We distinguish two concepts, two models, as two ways of viewing the same events. So we describe exactly the same system as either the result of chance or of necessity, depending on how we choose to view it. That is perfectly coherent.
What's not coherent is what you are attempting to do, which is to view chance and necessity as mutually exclusive attributes of the events themselves. Or at least you have yet to offer an explanation of how that is coherent, given what we know about physics.
I'm not responding to your red herring. You pretended that introducing necessity, chance and design constituted in some vague way an incoherent argument. This is non sense. You introduce a red herring by pleading chance and necessity are ultimately the same. I directly responded to your argument. My example of the dice clearly demonstrates that design is detectable as bias in the game. Someone rigged the dice. This is the fundamental and relevant point.
And I told you why your example didn't work. I'm sorry, but contradicting your central claim premise is not a red herring. You have to make an argument for chance, necessity and design as mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories; that's something you haven't done. What I did do was show that in your own example, chance, design and necessity were overlapping categories.
You can infer design. That is the point. No one is claiming there is a physical law that says X was designed. This is an inference, which is done all the time in historical sciences. Inference to the best explanation is a legitimate form of scientific reasoning.
Sure, you can infer design. But as a suggested earlier, we almost never infer design by the process you've claimed. Instead we infer design based on known properties of the designer, often combined with detailed knowledge of the possible behavior of the materials in question.
The laws of nature allow life as a chemical machine to function. Chance provides random mutations. You know this and I should not have to explain it.
You didn't answer my question. How does evolution depend on distinguishing between chance, necessity and design. (And note that you did not mention the third one here.)
No, our theories of the quantum world allows us to predict with fantastic accuracy, but we still do not know why the world is the way it is. We do not know if there are yet more fundamental laws which will explain the bizarre world of QM.
Perhaps, but we do have constraints on what "more fundamental laws" if they exist must do: they must replicate Bell's inequalities and hence there can be no local determinism.
Originally Posted by OrdinaryClay
The problem is not our lack of knowledge of the initial conditions. It is the systems sensitivity to the initial conditions (minuscule variations produce wide results in chaotic systems), and the shear complexity of any real world system. At some slice in time you can pick a set of initial conditions, but the total system is unpredictable and unmodelable because of its complexity. Furthermore, even if a system is chaotic and complex this does not mean that real randomness may not play a role in nature. We can not say with surety that all systems are ultimately deterministic. They may appear to be so at the macro level, but this does not mean the appearance is the full truth.
This is still all a red herring because it is perfectly legitimate to talk of chance as a governing factor in results.
I nearly broke out in a rash when you said "chaos". I suffer from buzzword-itis: the tendency to react violently when people throw around buzzwords they don't understand. And most people here who invoke chaos have no idea what it is.
1. Many systems are not chaotic. Cars do not blow up every day on the freeway, because the behavior of a few gazillion air molecules in a piston is on the macroscale entirely predictable.
2. Quantum systems are for the most part not chaotic. The time evolution of quantum systems is exactly governed by differential equations that are linear in their solutions (anything non-linear is normally an approximation): this decouples the fundamental source of randomness in nature from chaos.
3. Chaotic systems have complete causal models. In fact, we can't possibly identify a chaotic system unless we have a model for it. For, how exactly do you think we determine that a system has "sensitive dependence on initial conditions"? That's right, we plug in a set of initial conditions, see where the system goes, plug in another set, see where that goes, plug in a third set of initial conditions ... which requires that we have a completely deterministic model for how the system works.
4. Model reduction often creates chaos where nature does not have it. An ideal system of pendula is chaotic; however, a real pendulum with damping forces is not.
I hope the picture is clear: randomness often results specifically from lack of knowledge of initial conditions; and chaotic systems in which such randomness is most acutely demonstrated are completely deterministic.
To me this raises serious issues with the so-called "explanatory filter". After all, if the "separate categories" of necessity and chance aren't really separate categories, what are the chances that "design" isn't a separate category either? In fact, a moment's thought shows that, since no designer ever gets to break the laws of physics and chemistry, there is in fact a fundamental connection between "design" and "necessity" too, and the entire filter framework is thrown into disarray.
Some brief thoughts about Kolmogorov complexity - it seems to me that it's the worst possible measure of ID "information". Suppose I flip a coin 2,000 times and encode the result in a binary string. There is a good chance that this string will be mostly or entirely incompressible, and so the most random string is also the most "complex". On the other hand, strings with apparent randomness that are produced by deeply deterministic processes, such as the decimal expansion of pi or DNA strings, should have surprisingly small Kolmogorov complexity.
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And who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? - Origen, 215AD [De Principiis 4.1.16]
... to insist that the rising of the sun is figurative while the rising of the Son is literal is also hypocrisy.
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There seems to be a large misunderstanding surrounding how science infers causality in the case of non-reproducible historical events. The argument is made that ID does not provide an explanation because "it is not science". I think this is a demonstration of not understanding historical science.
Premise 1:
There have been significant attempts made to discover a natural mechanism through which the information contained in the DNA in Prokaryote cells could have arisen through natural mechanisms. None have succeeded. Premise 2:
We know through observation that complex collections of specified information always arise from intelligence. Conclusion:
We can through an inference to the best explanation conclude that the DNA in the first Prokaryote cells was a product of intelligent design.
watch "Expelled No Intelligence Allowed" it's a great documentary. Here's a clip from YouTube:
A great documentary? You've got to be kidding. Expelled is simply dishonest in both it's production and it's final form. It violates the 8th or 9th commandment (depending on which of the different versions of the ten commandments you use), and was a box office flop, even after some fundamentalist groups paid people to go see it.
I of course can't know exactly how much damage it has done to Christianity, but I'd guess that a lot of people who see Expelled end up thinking Christianity is pretty stupid if it inspired Expelled.
If you want to start a thread on the train wreck called Expelled, feel free - but seeing that expelled is mainly a political film, it doesn't seem to be central to the cellular idea of the OP.
Expelled is utter garbage. They use an interview that was done with Dawkins to make it sound like he was supporting panspermia (movie equivalent of quote mining), it employs all the same old fallacies....
But Expelled's producers decided to go one better by stealing a multi-million dollar microbiology animation from Harvard and XVIVO (an animation company).
Logan Craft
Chairman
Premise Media Corporation
Suite K
1850 Old Pecos Trail
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505
Re: Copyright infringement in “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”
Dear Mr. Craft:
This letter will constitute notice to you, as Chairman of Premise Media Corporation, of the copyright infringement by your
corporation, and its subsidiary, Rampant Films, of material produced by XVIVO LLC, in which XVIVO holds a copyright.
It has come to our intention that Premise Media and Rampant Films has produced a film entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence
Allowed,” which is scheduled for commercial release and distribution on April 18, 2008. To our knowledge, this film includes a
segment depicting biological cellular activity that was copied by computer-generated means from a video entitled “The Inner
Life of a Cell.” XVIVO holds the copyright to all the models, processes, and depictions in this video, and has not authorized
Premise Media or Rampant Films to make any use of this material.
We have obtained promotional material for the “Expelled” film, presented on a DVD, which clearly shows in the “cell segment”
the virtually identical depiction of material from the “Inner Life” video. Among the infringed scenes, we particularly refer to the
segment of the “Expelled” film purporting to show the “walking” models of kinesic activities in cellular mechanisms. The
segments depicting these models in your film are clearly based upon, and copied from, material in the “Inner Life” video.
We have been advised by counsel that this segment in your film constitutes an actionable infringement of XVIVO’s intellectual
property rights, as protected by federal statutes, including Section 106 of the Copyright Act, the Visual Artists Rights Act of
1990, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998. Each of these statutes provides for judicial enforcement of their
provisions, with substantial civil penalties for their infringement.
We have also obtained legal advice that your copying, in virtually identical form, of material in the “inner Life” video clearly
meets the legal test of “substantial similarity” between the copied work and our original work.
This letter will also serve as notice to you that XVIVO intends to vigorously and promptly pursue its legal remedies for your
copyright infringement, unless and until Premise Media, Rampant Films, and their officers, employees, and agents comply with
the following demands:
1) That Premise Media, Rampant Films, and its officers, employees, and agents remove the infringing segment from all
copies of the “Expelled” film prior to its scheduled commercial release on or before April 18, 2008;
2) That all copies of the “Inner Life” video in your possession or under your control be returned to XVIVO;
3) That Premise Media notify XVIVO, on or before April 18, 2008, of its compliance with the above demands.
We have been advised, by a telephone conversation with Mellie Bracewell of Premise Media on April 8, 2008, that an e-mail
transmission of this letter to her will be promptly forwarded to you. A hard copy of this letter, on XVIVO stationary, will also be
sent to you today by express delivery.
We are sure that you will want to avoid legal action in this matter, and urge you to promptly notify us of your compliance with
the above demands. You may do so by return e-mail, directed to @ xvivo.net or @ xv ivo.net, followed by a hard-
copied letter indicating your compliance with the above demands.
Sincerely,
David Bolinsky
Partner and Medical Director
XVIVO LLC
Michael Astrachan
Partner and Creative Director
XVIVO LLC
Cc: Peter Irons, Esq.
Attorney at Law
2551 North Valley Road
Greenville CA 95947
Apparently, Expelled's directors then thought it would be ethical to preemptively sue Harvard and XVIVO in a Texas court and ask for a "Declaratory" judgment, which would apparently burden the defense with the legal costs. The suit was dropped as it had become unfeasible for Harvard and XVIVO to seek damages as a result.
So basically, every time you watch Expelled, you get treated to this clip, which is really the property of Harvard, that Expelled flat-out stole. BioVisions
What an adorable film. Not only do they make all the same fallacies and use the same dishonest tactics, they blatantly stole other people's work.
"Expelled No Intelligence Allowed" it's a great documentary.
Not only was it a flop at the box office (at the end, Stein was reduced to offering kick-backs to churches willing to steer their members and youth groups to go see it) but it was a mammoth dishonesty.
Stein, for example, banned any scientists who were theistic evolutionists from his film. No intelligence allowed? You betcha.
At one point, he's pretending to speak to a student group on a university campus. But he had to hire extras to come in and pretend to be students in order to get a crowd to listen to him.
His dishonesty was so egregious when it came to his claims that scientists were behind the Nazi death camps, that the Anti-Defamation League felt compelled to issue this warning: New York, NY, April 29, 2008 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry. Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust
Stein threw his own people under the bus in his fruitless attempt to harm science.
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