Irreducible Complexity - If you believe this, what's your main example?

[Ectezus]

Shinbits, you seem to have a very simplistic view on 'randomness' and 'pure luck'.

There can most definitely be order in seemingly 'randomness'.
Lets take a closer look with an example you can hopefully understand.
Allright, lets throw 2 dice shall we?

There are 36 combinations in total. Does that mean each combination has an equal outcome percentage?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

a) Right off the bat, rolling a 1 is impossible since the lowest number with two dice will be 2. The maximum outcome is still 12.

b) The chance of rolling that 2 or 12 can only be the result of a single one combination. ie: 1+1 or 6+6. The chance of rolling this is only 2.78%

c) Rolling a 7 on the other hand can be the result of a 1+6, a 2+5, a 3+4, a 4+3, a 5+2 and a 6+1.
The chance to roll this number is 16.57%. This is 6 times as much compared with the 2 or 12 combinations!

There can be order in randomness.
Whenever you make an argument for 'pure luck' or 'randomness', please keep that in mind.

- Ectezus

 

[juvenissun]

when doing the actually testing though, its the evidence that leads, not the conclusion., regardless of the proposal. The people with grant money tend to not be scientists, they would not understand.

Not necessary. Wrong sample or wrong procedure or wrong design could all produce false, or irrelevant evidence. That is why the "conclusion first" is so important. To put it in a more logic term, it is called the "goal".

 

[juvenissun]

A real scientist would say: Hypothesis first.
A conclusion is something you make AFTER you've found evidence, whether it's in support of the hypothesis or disproves it. Both are important.

No. a hypothesis is too weak and too limited, even it is still a good thing for a beginning researcher.

 

[Chalnoth]

Not necessary. Wrong sample or wrong procedure or wrong design could all produce false, or irrelevant evidence. That is why the "conclusion first" is so important. To put it in a more logic term, it is called the "goal".

And that sort of thinking becomes a liability if you're not willing to change that conclusion based upon the evidence. Which you don't appear to be.

 

[Naraoia]

and where has it been observed that laws come from?

The laws (or rather, their consequences) have been observed. And higher-level phenomena have a long history of being discovered to come from lower-level phenomena. Is it a big stretch to say that where today's "fundamental" laws come from is an empirical question?

chance is any outcome not affected by willful decision.

Uh, no. Chance is any outcome not determined by the starting conditions.

but you'll probably respond by saying akin to "well the laws are the dice, the outcome is the universe."

Your predictive power fails.

but everyone knows that dice don't appear in casinos by random chance. a designer makes them, and ships them to the casino. and just as it would be silly to assume the dice came into existence by random chance, it's just as silly to assume the laws of the universe also arrived by random chance.

I agree with TeddyKGB. If you argue by analogy, at least use one that works.

let's throw the ball in your court: if laws were not created intentionally, how did they come into being?

First of all, I didn't say they are not created intentionally, I (at least hope I) said they need not be. Second, refer back to my musing about chains of events/causation. I'd love to see your opinion.

how do you miss the many times I've pointed out that the teleological argument central to ID, existed many centuries before creationists impossed their agenda on ID?

Yes, and the word "rape" existed centuries before it came to commonly mean "screw by force". Wouldn't it save us all a lot of pointless bickering if you adapted to the current state of the English language?

as mentioned before, the die still has to be created first.

Irrelevant. The origin of the dice is not part of the analogy.

as adressed already, loaded dice are the result of someone's willlful interference, making it ID.

Irrelevant. The origin of the dice is not part of the analogy.

Analogies are never perfect. It's a very good idea to realise that before you extend them too far.

wrong. they are not the same. this is quite simply because not "anything" is possible. You will never see a sentient Bugs Bunny giving birth to a sentient version of one of the CF's smilies.

so as you can see, they are NOT the same.

Isn't that exactly what I said?

*sigh*.

anything unintentional is an accident. the result of an accident is a chance event.

You don't seem to get the concept of deterministic processes.

Die rolls are not random; they are simply preposterously difficult to predict.

For some practical purposes, they can be regarded as random, which is enough for the purposes of the analogy. And they don't sound nearly as geeky as wavefunction collapses

 

[Naraoia]

Not necessary. Wrong sample or wrong procedure or wrong design could all produce false, or irrelevant evidence. That is why the "conclusion first" is so important. To put it in a more logic term, it is called the "goal".

The whole point of science is to find out things we don't know. Given that, it's idiotic to assume that you Know The Truth and the experiments must be wrong. Yes, they can be, but if you suspect that's the case, the solution isn't to throw them away because they don't agree with your "goal". It's to do them again, correcting the mistakes you think you made, and see if they still disagree with your "goal".

 

[juvenissun]

The whole point of science is to find out things we don't know. Given that, it's idiotic to assume that you Know The Truth and the experiments must be wrong. Yes, they can be, but if you suspect that's the case, the solution isn't to throw them away because they don't agree with your "goal". It's to do them again, correcting the mistakes you think you made, and see if they still disagree with your "goal".

Experiment could never be wrong (any data will get an interpretation). Most of them simply do not really explain the thing you want to explain. Repeat the experiment does not help (increase the precision, but not the accuracy). The more you repeat, the deeper the mislead. A better way is to resample and redesign.

 

[Chalnoth]

Experiment could never be wrong (any data will get an interpretation). Most of them simply do not really explain the thing you want to explain. Repeat the experiment does not help (increase the precision, but not the accuracy). The more you repeat, the deeper the mislead. A better way is to resample and redesign.

You do realize, I hope, that this is precisely what scientists do? That they don't simply try to tackle a problem from one single angle, but also try to tackle it from other angles as well? That when testing a theory, they don't just do one type of experiment to test that theory, but go after every testable prediction of the theory?

 

[Naraoia]

Experiment could never be wrong (any data will get an interpretation). Most of them simply do not really explain the thing you want to explain. Repeat the experiment does not help (increase the precision, but not the accuracy). The more you repeat, the deeper the mislead. A better way is to resample and redesign.

You do also realise that there was a half-sentence in my post that said, "correcting the mistakes you think you made"?

Of course repeating a bad experiment will get you nowhere, but I've never said otherwise.

 

[juvenissun]

You do realize, I hope, that this is precisely what scientists do? That they don't simply try to tackle a problem from one single angle, but also try to tackle it from other angles as well? That when testing a theory, they don't just do one type of experiment to test that theory, but go after every testable prediction of the theory?

Yes. We have the theory FIRST. Just like "evolution", it is conclusion FIRST. So is the "creation".

 

[Hespera]

Biblical "revelation" is nothing like a theory. it is pretty much the opposite of a theory. If you believe in revelation, then you have your conclusion. Study of old scrolls or whatever is just affirming belief.

it most certainly is not "Just like evolution"; it could hardly be more different.

The people who developed the theory of evolution started out as creationists.
The theory of evolution is not a conclusion. The theory of evolution followed observation.

The order was belief in creation->observation and study->theory of evolution.

This is simple and obvious.

 

[Ectezus]

Yes. We have the theory FIRST. Just like "evolution", it is conclusion FIRST. So is the "creation".

Juvenissun, I'm curious, do you ever get tired of being wrong?

Evolution has only been around 200 years because during that period we humans started gathering enough information about the subject. This information led to the theory, not the other way around.

You also still don't seem to understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. The scientific usage of theory is entirely different of how we use it in everyday language. A theory is actually the highest you can get in science and it means it's a well established framework with a lot of evidence to support it. 'Laws' only exist in the realm of mathematics.

- Ectezus

 

[juvenissun]

Juvenissun, I'm curious, do you ever get tired of being wrong?

Evolution has only been around 200 years because during that period we humans started gathering enough information about the subject. This information led to the theory, not the other way around.

You also still don't seem to understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. The scientific usage of theory is entirely different of how we use it in everyday language. A theory is actually the highest you can get in science and it means it's a well established framework with a lot of evidence to support it. 'Laws' only exist in the realm of mathematics.

- Ectezus

That is REALLY where the problem is. We can do better. If science could not do it, than do something else.

So, study your science. When you find that it is not enough, you have my blessing.

 

[Ectezus]

That is REALLY where the problem is. We can do better. If science could not do it, than do something else.

So, study your science. When you find that it is not enough, you have my blessing.

Ah guess we've found the underlying cause. You think a theory isn't good enough for ya eh?
Like the Theory of gravity, because it's a theory is therefore must only be speculation right?

The reason we call it a theory is because there is ALWAYS a possibility of uncertainty. Claiming to know absolutely everything about a subject and to exclude any other possibility is beyond belief stupidity.


If science actually could prove god isn't real and we would find every single transitional form AND we found life on another planet that also shows evolution in progress it would still be called a theory.

The word theory, unlike daily use of the term, has nothing to do with it being unclear or not supported by evidence, in fact it's quite the contrary in the scientific world which you obviously aren't an integral part of.

- Ectezus

 

[Chalnoth]

Yes. We have the theory FIRST. Just like "evolution", it is conclusion FIRST. So is the "creation".

Uh, that's entirely false. The theory of evolution was deduced after observing a large number of facts. It wasn't arrived at easily, either, as naturalists (what biologists were called back then) had been groping towards a theory of descent with modification for over a century before Darwin.

Darwin wasn't working with his theory of evolution as his default conclusion. He arrived at that conclusion after realizing that previous theories of descent with modification didn't match with his observations.

 

[Naraoia]

The theory of evolution is not a conclusion. The theory of evolution followed observation.

Which still makes it a conclusion, just a valid one

That is REALLY where the problem is. We can do better. If science could not do it, than do something else.

So, study your science. When you find that it is not enough, you have my blessing.

Not enough for what? It's enough for what I want to use it for. IMHO it's the only way we can find out something about objective reality. For my subjective judgements, of course I use something else.

 

[Ectezus]

Anyone else on the subject?

With irreducible complexity being so important for the intelligent design movement I expected a lot of examples of what people believe to be the main evidence for irreducible complexity. Instead I get zero :/

 

[LifeToTheFullest!]

Since were not getting very good examples from creationists, I'll thrown one out there for them.

The mouse trap. It serves a purpose, and it was obviously designed to catch mice, therefore it had a designer. If you take away any one piece of the mouse trap, it no longer can function as a mouse trap. Therefore, a mouse trap cannot be reduced to any other discernable purpose. God exists.

 

[pgp_protector]

Since were not getting very good examples from creationists, I'll thrown one out there for them.

The mouse trap. It serves a purpose, and it was obviously designed to catch mice, therefore it had a designer. If you take away any one piece of the mouse trap, it no longer can function as a mouse trap. Therefore, a mouse trap cannot be reduced to any other discernable purpose. God exists.

http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html

 

[LifeToTheFullest!]

http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html

but, but... Behe said so.