Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by luvluv:

"God has not been disproven yet, and it is not yet illogical nor IRRATIONAL (can someone distinguish the two?) to believe in Him."

Is it irrational to believe in magical undetectable elves that care deeply about humans' activities? My position is that it is indeed irrational to believe in things for which there is no evidence.

"Why are you so terrified of mystery?"

I love mystery. What I don't love is when people conclude from a mystery some sort of extraordinary synthetic proposition, instead of just admitting that we don't know.

"I'm not very impressed with inductive evidence in totally unrelated fields in a situation where there is absolutely no empirical evidence and in a situation in which the deductive evidence would seem to contradict a very, very weak inductive premise."

Wait a minute... absolutely no empirical evidence? Remember, we've observed all the bits and pieces forming in natural early earth conditions. I'm sure any modern biology textbook will have what you need.

"Again, you are ASSERTING that higher mathematical abilities go along with big brains."

It just seems to make sense. Call "big brains" a good explanation for why we can reason abstractly.

"Ockham's Razor states that one should believe in the explanation that has the least assumptions, does it not?"

The Razor says we shouldn't stick in unnecessary hypotheses, such as "the cause had a mind," or "the cause exists outside of the universe," or something equally unnecessary and deistic.

"At any rate, wouldn't it be fair to say that there are far more Deists and Theists in cosmology than in any other science?"

Actually, the cosmologists are the least likely to believe in God. It's in the Skeptic magazine with Deepak Chopra on the cover; I can go dig up the actual citation if you want.

"But it CONTRADICTS naturalism, and that was my point."

I'm saying it certainly doesn't contradict naturalism. We still don't need to posit anything supernatural (if we even know what that means).

"Mere improbability is ALWAYS evidence of 'not chance', though it is never proof of 'not chance'."

I don't think it's even evidence, not anything useful at least. The probability that the rocks in the cement in my driveway would end up arranged just that way is miniscule. Do you think someone cheated? Do you think there's any evidence that someone cheated?

"Biological complexity of the type which we find in the simplest life forms has specified information in it that exceeds an entire volume of the Encyclopedia Britanica."

All I can see is increased magnitude of complexity, and I'm suggesting we extrapolate from smaller cases to these larger cases. Does information simply result from randomness (qua uncompressibility)? I think a case can be made that it does. In that case, snowflakes certainly don't contain much information, but the sand after a wave attack certainly does.

"I think most people would agree that you still have the ability to eat food, your inability to eat it is circumstantial and in no way demonstrates a lack of power on your part."

What about my magic wand example? My environment fails to contain a magic wand that would let me do anything I wanted to. So the limitation seems to be environmental in this case.

"Why would omnibenevolence refer to the inabliity to do evil rather than the refusal to do evil?"

Again, I wonder how you cash out "is able to." What does that mean? What does "x is able to y" mean? I say it means either "there is a possible world in which x does y" or "if x tries to do y, x succeeds sometimes." God's moral perfection is such that if He ever did evil, He wouldn't be God anymore -- so God (as a morally perfect being) is never doing evil.

"After all, a rock is incapable of doing evil... is it omnibenevolent?"

Sorry to fallacy-fling, but this is Converting a Conditional. It's true that if morally perfect, then incapable of doing evil, but the converse doesn't hold.

"No one could call something good which has no capacity of being evil."

I'm not so sure. Suppose someone named "Flanders" is defined to be someone who always chooses good. This person is incapable of ever doing evil, but yet, no one (I hope) has a problem calling him a good person.

Jayhawker Soule

The assertion that "God has not been disproven yet" is both "extremely uncontroversial" and extremely worthless. There are any number of fantasies that have "not been disproven yet". It is precisely as 'logical and RATIONAL' (see a priori and a posteriori) to believe in God(s) as in the Unicorn and the Daoine Sidhe.
What despicable, pompous, ignorant crap you spew for the glory of your God(s). Go read something like <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1RYOTA3EGT&isbn=0195136292" target="_blank">Sacred Depths of Nature</a> and then, if you wish, come back and insult us further with inane talk about your superior spirit and intellect.
And I made that "assurance" (blessed or otherwise) where, exactly?
No.
I will gladly concede any "good reasons" you deign to submit. Neither appeals to ignorance nor pretentious eulogies about your superior spirit and intellect fall into this category.

[ December 21, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

The AntiChris

Is this the Argument from Desperation?

Chris

Synaesthesia

Nothing is the 'sum' of it's parts but a sum. A triangle is not the sum of it's parts, although it is nothing more than it's parts and their relationships.

So too is the mind nothing more than relationships, the most important of which are within our brains. None of these important relationships are nonphysical.

Secondly, evolution is a high-level explanation. As such, it will never be the only story. However, the emergence of consciousness as a biological phenomenon can be accounted for by evolution.

luvluv

Thomas Metcalf:

Thomas, I'm telling you, you are behind the times. Most of the conditions which were presumed to exist on the primordial earth when these experiments were formed are now known not to have been present. Beyond that, certain factors all but inhibiting the formation of those materials WERE present. This is partly what has thrown the origin of life science into dissaray, and why it has prompted serious scientists to conjecture that the pre-biotic material must have come from space... at least until that theory was also disproven. I'll go get some relavent information, but I'm telling you if these textbooks you are referring to are more than about 5 years old they are obselete. They are behind the current findings.

My point is that there are other brains in nature in other primates. These brains do everything our brains do except for abstract reasoning and higher math. Gorilla's have big brains, though not as big as ours. The selective advantages that our brains provide which we have actually used for most of our history (up until about 100 years ago, really) have not exceeded that of many primates to any incredible degree. Note, I am not saying that we aren't much smarter than primates, only that the level of our intellect that has contributed to our continued survival (building shelter [for survival's sake, not for appearance] forming primative medicines [which was, until very recently, largely ineffective], etc.) has not greatly exceeded that of the other primates. In short, we are MORE capable than that which is necessary to survive. And though our higher functions have brought us luxuries and new technologies, they haven't done so to any large degree until VERY recently. So what was the selective advantage that kept all that unused genius going? Why would nature select for something that was for so long unnecessary?

Perhaps so as regards the mind, but by definition the cause of the universe must be outside of the universe. A thing cannot have it's cause within itself, isn't this a first principle of logic? The thing which caused the universe to exist cannot itself be part of the universe. That, incidentally, is the full extent of what I mean by supernatural: outside of the universe, and therefore outside of the scope of nature.

I'd like to have a look at it, sure. That isn't what I've heard, though. I've heard reputable scientists say the opposite, that astronomers and astrophycisists are the most likely to be somewhat deistic in their beliefs.

The cause of the universe must be outside of the universe and therefore supernatural.

Well, anyway they were arranged probably wouldn't make any difference, but the anthropic coincidences make the situation a little more complex because there are so many arrangements which would not produce life. I mean, if the rocks in your yard spelled out the word. "I love you" would that be evidence? So what if the DNA in my body held the "words" for the person "luvluv", would that be evidence for anything? Matter has arranged itself in such a way as to convey information. The rocks in your yard do not convey any information in any language we know, but we KNOW that the DNA in our bodies contains explicit information. I would say that you used a false analogy.

It's not so much that DNA contains information, it is that it is part of a system for encoding, translating, and most importantly IMPLEMENTING the information. The movement of sand is not part of such a system. We, of course,as rational creatures, can encode, translate, and implement the information content of the moving sand. But that is because we have minds. But sand does not do that in itself. The difference, in a nutshell, is that DNA "seems to know" that it is information. It treats itself, and is treated by other molecules which use it, as if it was information. Any attempts to skirt this fact seem to me to be desperate reaches to avoid the obvious conclusion. Again, it is my opinion that it would be infinitely more reasonable to suggest that the system of DNA was invented and implemented by alien intelligence than to try to suggest it invented and implemented itself.

I disagree. One could argue that the magic wand was omnipotent but no case could be made for your omnipotence. You would not be omnipotent, even if you had the magic wand. The omnipotence would arise from another agent.

I don't see any reason to believe He would cease to be God. He would simply cease to be omnibenevolent. Again, this seems to proceed from a theology which you have no right, epistemically speaking, to inject into the argument.

I'd have a problem calling him a PERSON. An entity which could not do evil would not be a person, it would be something else. An android, perhaps.

Name-Changing guy:

I truly believe, in your more discriminating moments, that you will look back on that passage and be moved.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by luvluv:

"Most of the conditions which were presumed to exist on the primordial earth when these experiments were formed are now known not to have been present."

Well, what's your source on this? There's at least one entire journal devoted to this topic. But as for information about "prebiotic" experiments, see <a href="http://www.ncseweb.org/icons/icon1millerurey.html" target="_blank">this page</a>.

"In short, we are MORE capable than that which is necessary to survive."

Well, of course. It's not as if it's "either you survive, or you don't." The really smart people survived a little better than the kind of smart people, who survived better than the stupid people. We're a lot smarter than gorillas, and I still don't see why it should be surprising that a consequence of being really smart is that we can reason abstractly.

"That, incidentally, is the full extent of what I mean by supernatural: outside of the universe, and therefore outside of the scope of nature."

Then I have to say I don't agree with this definition. To me, a supernatural entity is one that science is in principle incapable of approaching or describing accurately. I can think of some weird extra-spatial glop of stuff that produced the universe, and it doesn't seem particularly supernatural.

"I've heard reputable scientists say the opposite, that astronomers and astrophycisists are the most likely to be somewhat deistic in their beliefs."

I'm home for the holidays, but when I get back to college I'll let you know. I think the year is 1998.

"I mean, if the rocks in your yard spelled out the word. 'I love you' would that be evidence?"

Yes, because I already know that there were people in a position to mess with how the driveway turned out. We don't already know there's a God messing around with the constants of the universe. If we did, then we would know that it was probably God Who arranged them.

"rocks in your yard do not convey any information in any language we know, ..."

But they still could contain just as much information as the arrangement that read "I love you." It's just that we humans care about "I love you" the way we care about life-permission.

"It treats itself, and is treated by other molecules which use it, as if it was information."

We could start treating the sand as information any time we wanted to do so. It's just inefficient. Why isn't the way the sand turns out the "implementation" of the waves?

"One could argue that the magic wand was omnipotent but no case could be made for your omnipotence. You would not be omnipotent, even if you had the magic wand. The omnipotence would arise from another agent."

But magic wands are not agents, and non-agents are not omnipotent. Your position seems to be that if we stick God in a reality that contains no facts He doesn't know, He would still be omnipotent, but if we stick God in a reality that contains no pies He can eat, He wouldn't be omnipotent? Or would He? If I'm alone in an empty universe, an I omnipotent? I don't really understand the distinction. I could just as easily say the limitation in my environment is the lack of metaphysically-produced abilities to do anything, the way the limitation in God's environment is the lack of unknown facts.

"I don't see any reason to believe He would cease to be God. He would simply cease to be omnibenevolent."

God is defined to be omnibenevolent, so an omnibenevolent being would not be God. I'm saying omnibenevolence is an essential property of God. And again, I want to see your definition of "x has the ability to do y."

"An entity which could not do evil would not be a person, it would be something else."

You're saying that moral perfection is incoherent? It seems that it would be, because a morally perfect being could never choose evil. If it tried to choose evil, it would fail; there is no possible world in which it will choose evil; no matter how long you observe it, it will never choose evil; these all seem to say it doesn't have the ability to choose evil.

Do you agree, at least, that a necessarily morally perfect being could never choose evil?

luvluv

Well, I got my info more informally so it's hard to document. Hugh Ross had a pretty good show about ISSOL 02 but has apparently not printed a report on the conference up for his website yet, so I'll have to link you to his report on the 99 meeting here:

<a href="http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/issol99fromfff.shtml?main" target="_blank">http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/issol99fromfff.shtml?main</a>

Granted, he lays it on a little thick (even for my tastes) but he is kind enough to reference his analysis with the relevant papers. I wouldn't use him but it's the only laymen level report on the conference that I can find on the web.

Here is a rundown of ISSOL's own report from 99 and '02 for you to compare. Though they are nearly Greek to me, most of the conjecture seems to center around the injection of biotic forms from other planets, and the problem of "instant life", or the fact that life arose on the planet in a geological instant.

Here's 02:

<a href="http://www.issol.org/newsF02.html" target="_blank">http://www.issol.org/newsF02.html</a>

And here's 99:

<a href="http://www.issol.org/archive/newsF99.html" target="_blank">http://www.issol.org/archive/newsF99.html</a>

I don't know if you're into molecular biology. If not, then we are going to have to find somebody to explain the details to both of us.

Actually, it is either you survive or you don't. Either you have progeny or you don't. That's all natural selection is, the ability to survive long enough to have offspring. I don't really think people with great abstract mathematical skills have more children than your average sharecropper. And most men at most times haven't done anything any more complicated than farming for the entire history of the species.

And where does this glop exist? There is no "space", no heighth, width, or length, for this "glop" to exist. If you can think of an entity having neither width nor length nor height nor existing in time then you are a pretty special intellect. Science IS in principle incapable of approaching or describing accurately whatever produced the universe. That is true by definition. We cannot make any discoveries about something which exists outside of our universe. It is beyond the reach of science.

Whether you know there is an entity around or not, specified, ordered, complex information is always going to be evidence of intelligence. I was actually referring to DNA in the portion that your above comment is reffering to. We don't know that there wasn't SOME intelligence around to create DNA. I say again I am not arguing for the Chrisitan position on this thread.

I don't think you are following the way I am using the term information. Certainly, rocks contain information. Everything that we could observe and make comments on contains information. However, what DNA has is basically LANGUAGE. That is to say, it takes a complicated "idea", packages it into a form in which it can be easily exchanged and decoded (words) and delivers it to another party where the word is interpreted.

The rock formation which would spell out I love you, unlike the random scattering of rocks, would contain a complex information condensed into a useable package and intended to be "unpacked" by a receiver. Only intelligence does this.

To put it another way, if we started recieving a signal from deep space which was the number pi out to one hundred decimal points repeated over and over again, would you say there was intelligence behind that or that it was a random occurance? And how much more complicated is a single cell than pie out to one hundred decimals?

Yes, WE could, because we have minds. But molecules should not be able to, because they don't. And yet they do.

You are confusing me! All I'm saying is I think that if God was in a world containing no facts that He did not know, that you have no right to say He lacks the ability to learn. That adds an assumption to the facts. All omniscience implies is that there is nothing for God to learn. There is nothing for God to learn does not equal God lacks the power to learn. It may mean He lacks the opportunity to learn, but that does not detract from the power He holds within Himself.

Well, I suppose you could say that if I am a shop-clerk at safeway, I cannot curse out the customers or else I will get fired and I will not be the shop clerk at safeway. Does that therefore mean that I lack the power to curse out a customer?

Isn't it logically possible that God "could" do evil, but won't in order to preserve His Deity?

I'm simply wondering whether, logically, we are bound to the idea that any omnibenevolent being must be necessarily omnibenevolent. If a being was capable of doing evil, but always did good and never did evil, would such a being be omnibenevolent?

Is an agent which will never do evil any less benevolent than a being that is incapable of doing evil? I don't think that logic dictates that this must be so, and as you are attempting a logical disproof, it's up to you to convince me.

[ December 21, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

Jayhawker Soule

And all this time I thought it was the willingness of these theorists "to self-mutilate their spirit, to castrate their intellect by literally severing off any question that cannot be answered within the confines of their narrow world-view". What you see (hopefully) as disarray is little more than the typical dialectic of science.

The statement "We don't know." is far from inferior to the doctrine "God(s) did it".

Evolution in no way requires "real abstract mathematical skills" to result in the capacity tp produce more children.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by luvluv:

"Well, I got my info more informally so it's hard to document."

But here's the thing. We still have some reason to believe these processes can arise naturally, so it makes more sense to adopt that hypothesis, for the time being. We still don't have reason to appeal to anything supernatural.

"That's all natural selection is, the ability to survive long enough to have offspring."

No, that's too simplistic. It's about producing a number of offspring, not just something binary like "either produces offspring or doesn't." Species that give birth to and raise litters of ten will do better than species that give birth to and raise litters of five, all else equal. Now, I agree that the smartest people don't have the most children these days, but they're better at helping them survive, and I suspect strongly that in the past, the smarter tribes made the better tools and killed more animals.

"We cannot make any discoveries about something which exists outside of our universe. It is beyond the reach of science."

I don't agree. My point is that for something to be supernaturalistic, I think it has to have an origin and character in something indescribable in principle. I don't see why we can't hypothesize about entities outside the universe proper.

"The rock formation which would spell out I love you, unlike the random scattering of rocks, would contain a complex information condensed into a useable package and intended to be 'unpacked' by a receiver. Only intelligence does this."

Ah, "intended." You've already supposed intentionality, which presupposes a mind. We could unpack the rocks however we wanted to do so. How do we know they're not arranged by some code to give information to alien races? There's nothing intrinsically about the information that makes it intended to be interpreted -- it's only the contingent fact that it is interpreted, and whether it is seems arbitrary.

"To put it another way, if we started recieving a signal from deep space which was the number pi out to one hundred decimal points repeated over and over again, would you say there was intelligence behind that or that it was a random occurance?"

Intelligence, but only because pi is useful to us. If it were spitting out some other irrational number, we'd think it was random, unless that irrational number happened to be useful to us. It's all about having the right kind of interpreter at the other end; it's we humans that impute meaningful information into these processes. Take the ocean waves example again. The water is really good at transmitting the information, and the sand is really good at decoding it -- and if the sand were somehow important to us, we'd care about it a lot more and maybe impute some intelligence.

"It may mean He lacks the opportunity to learn, but that does not detract from the power He holds within Himself."

God could learn, if there were more facts in His environment, then. But that's the same thing as saying God could learn if He weren't omniscient. I mean, I could do any action x if there were something about my environment that allowed me to be able to do x. Does that make me omnipotent?

"Well, I suppose you could say that if I am a shop-clerk at safeway, I cannot curse out the customers or else I will get fired and I will not be the shop clerk at safeway. Does that therefore mean that I lack the power to curse out a customer?"

No, but suppose you know beforehand that you will never curse out a customer, even given an infinity of time. Suppose you knew, further, that every time you chose to curse out a customer, you would necessarily fail. You will never, ever curse out a customer, no matter what happens. Does that sound as if you have the power to curse out a customer?

"I'm simply wondering whether, logically, we are bound to the idea that any omnibenevolent being must be necessarily omnibenevolent."

If we view omnibenevolence as moral perfection, then we know that omnibenevolence will persist, because to choose to stop being omnibenevolent is, itself, not omnibenevolent.

"If a being was capable of doing evil, but always did good and never did evil, would such a being be omnibenevolent?"

Yes, but so would a being, I think, that wasn't capable of doing evil. A being that never ever did any evil -- that never even considered doing evil for a second -- seems to be morally perfect.

"Is an agent which will never do evil any less benevolent than a being that is incapable of doing evil?"

I'd say moral perfection is a matter of the actions one takes. Sum up all the actions a person takes over his or her life, and if it's impossible to conceive of a way for that person to have taken morally better actions, then that person is morally perfect. So I'd say both of those agents would be equally morally good.

Synaesthesia

Incorrect. The design hypothesis is fundamentally flawed as an explanation for any complexity, since it operates only by presupposing complexity.

A related point is that naturalistic hypotheses are better supported because they are more parsimonious. Thus, even though you are not even correctly applying the idea of specified complexity to DNA, a naturalistic hypotheses is a priori preferable to any design hypotheses.

You have simply eliminated scientific hypotheses without any justification for doing so. You have not adressed the fundamental flaws with God theory, you have not justified it's place as a default hypotheses and you have simply ruled out of court any merely relational account of the world - science, in a word.

[ December 23, 2002: Message edited by: Synaesthesia ]</p>