Ed

I try to respond to them in chronological order, no offense intended.

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Ed: No, natural laws and laws of physics would still exist whether or not humans did. They are independent of us. Also molecules do not exhibit quantum behavior only subatomic particles do. It is not meaningless to speak of such a law just because we haven't discovered it yet. According to logic it should exist. Dat: But as I said, it is meaningless for us to talk of them when we know nothing of them, when we cannot know anything of them. Regarding to the discussion at hand, you do not know whether the Universe is actually ordered underneath the randomness that we see, the randomness that we must see in order to make an observation (evidence) by which a hypothesis/theory/law must come about. The law of logic saids nothing of some underlying unifying law, or anything that requires order. Then again, you once again assume that the "laws of logic" (remember what I wrote above, that human laws are merely approximations - the bane of logic lies in paradoxes) are ultimate and indestructible. Must I remind you that they themselves were conceived by empirical evidence as well?

What randomness we must see? No, the laws of logic are intrinsic to the human mind. Without them we cannot even think or communicate with language. They were confirmed and expanded with empirical evidence but they were not conceived by empirical evidence. In fact, empirical evidence presupposes logic. The question is how did it get there?

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Ed:It is not by my word, my point is that it is a rational assumption given that we do it in other situations that we cannot empirically verify. Dat: Why? Empirical verification, or the possibility of verification, is what makes extrapolation rational and reasonable. Then again, I can easily claim that as we have explained everything via naturalistic means, we can extend this to cut out God completely. <shrugs> It's a horrible argument either way.

There is no possibility of empirical verification of events in the past and yet we still make extrapolations based on logic. The same thing applies to "outside" the universe.

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Ed: No, the greek gods were different by essence. Mars is the war god. Venus is the love god and etc. Their very essence is different from each other. Their invention by the greeks does not make their essence the same. Dat: Ed, your definition of "essence" is whatever is convienient at the moment to make sense of the situation according to you. Let's take, for example, your idea that stars in galaxies are a "diversity within a unity". What is their "essence"? What unities them into a galaxy other than physical locality? As a matter of fact, what non-living thing as this "essence", if we look at the example that you give above?

Essence varies according to what the thing is. The essence of galaxies is stars and gravity, ie black holes.

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Ed: No, those commonalities would exist whether there were humans thinking or not. Dat: I've already admitted to that. What I'm debating is whether this actually means anything. We notice, for example, that there is a great diversity of plants. Is this then any surprise if we theorize that they came from a common ancestor, and evolved through time in different environments? We don't need some mystical explanation muddled in some "law of sufficient cause".

We do if we want to go beyond a common ancestor and on to the ultimate cause. Most people have a natural curiousity to go beyond what you seem to want to do. This curiousity was also a common characteristic of great scientists of history like Galileo, Newton, and Pascal.

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Ed: But PE is based on LACK of data. Also there is evidence that Darwin specifically developed his theory to try to account for life without reference to a creator. Dat: .....and that is invalid because...? A theory on the decay of protons was made in physics a while ago; experiments were conducted, but its empirical validity was not observed, so the theory had to be discarded and a new one formulated based on the lack of proton decay. And whether it is specifically targeted against theism or not does not determine whether it's fallacious or otherwise. Its intent is independent of its logic.

PE was developed to prevent the falsifiability of macroevolution. It conveniently assumes speciation only occurs where fossils are not left. Presuppositions and intent often color the interpretation of data so Darwin's intent definitely is not independent of its validity.

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Ed: Theoretically ANYTHING is possible. But it depends on whether the theory is logical or not. Many scientific theories are not logical so they are rejected and that should be the case with this one. Dat: Ed, stop going around in circles. A lot of theories are logically possible - that is the least of its requirements. A better requirement is that it is consistent with reality and observation...and this theory is consistent as it builds from observation. Until you can find something empirically that contradicts this, the theory is valid.

This theory IS consistent with reality and observation. There is empirical evidence that contradicts atheistic evolution.

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Ed: No, because the only cause of the universe that is a diversity within a unity (that is not an ad hoc explanation) is the christian God so to find out what his character is you have to have a communication from him. Because there is also good in the universe, where did that come from? Dat: What?! The law of sufficient cause, as far as I can tell, applies to everything; you certainly have made it apply to everything, and it's a bit too late to take that claim back. I'm not saying that God isn't good - just that he is not wholly good, with no trace of evil. According to your presumptions, that is logically impossible.

No, the effect is not the mirror image of the cause. The law of sufficient cause just states that the cause must be adequate to produce the effect. Since God is a personal being with a moral will. So the personal beings that he created also have a moral will that unfortunately usually chooses evil.

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Ed: Everything. All the best theories use evidence from present processes to make conclusions about past events. Dat: Exactly. And the rapid expansion of the Universe, coupled with the ratios of stars (different types) and background radiation quickly confirm that the BB is true. Of course, we also notice that the only element required for stars and stellar fusion is hydrogen, and that heavier elements are merely masses of added atoms. The BB details how the first element was formed, and how fusion itself created heavier elements. Please review how it works...you seem to be completely lost on the issue.

Once you go beyond the formation of stars, everything is pure speculation and goes against the laws of logic.

[b] The firing squad represents the high probability against all the parameters of the universe being right to produce life.

[ January 15, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

Synaesthesia

Punctuated equlibrium is a theory meant to explain the distribution of morphological variation, NOT the density of fossil finds.

The fossil record appears to have been layed down by the accumulation of new layers of matter on the surface of the earth over the old. Amongst the matter and sediments that clutter the earth’s surface at any given time are living things. Under certain circumstances, the form of an individual animal is preserved through the process of fossilization.

Of course this process will occur more in some places than others, more during a certain time than other times and only a tiny minority of species ever survives in fossil form. For this reason, the fossil record cannot give us the remains of every individual creature that ever lived. Fortunately, we have enough fossils to establish clear morphological trends over time. We can (approximately) track the growth and decline of a prolific species.

As a result of studying this information, it has become clear that animals do not change (morphologically) at the same rate all the time. Sometimes the population is very quickly replaced by a variety of mutant, sometimes (as in sharks) they stay very similar for many millions of years. Let me again emphasize that the evidence used is NOT only trends in how MANY fossils we find. The question, and this remains true whether we have thousands of fossils spanning 2 million years or only a few dozen over the same time period (although more data enables you to get a clearer picture of the situation, more pixels so to speak), is at what rate changes in form take over.

What does evolution have to do with atheism other than filling up positions previously occupied by gods and demons?

Yes indeed, up in the sky there is a giant, huge roulette wheel (or something analogous in the sense of being a random event) which choose whether the universe would be made right for life or not. We also assume that only a few slots in this giant roulette wheel in the sky will permit life. Ok, so the reasoning goes, “what better to explain the unlikely selection of a life-bearing universe than someone who FIXED the giant wheel so that it would choose life. God exists, QED.

This argument falls because we have no method of judging how unlikely the universe is- we don’t know how it was created, whether the pull of gravity truly independent of the weak nuclear force.

We do know that we are here asking the questions and if the roulette wheel did not select a viable universe, we would not have known about it.

lpetrich

All the period before the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests.

Pure excuse-making. Sufficiently imprecise language can be used to prove essentially anything.

Ed, I wonder if you have ever seriously studied the fossil record. And the geological timescale. Remains of our species are only found in the topmost sediments, those within the last 50,000 - 100,000 years or so; there are some ancestral and offshoot species before that which look somewhat simian -- and the farther back one goes, the more simian they look. But even the oldest ones found to date are something like 4 million years old, which is a tiny fraction of the Earth's age.

There is abundant evidence of floral and faunal continuity in many of our planet's landmasses that clearly indicate that a worldwide flood had not occurred in the last 100,000 years ago -- at least.

Ed, are you really serious about that statement?

Read the article -- it makes a good case for Moses being a mythical feature.

[b]

Actually, Allah is described by Muslims has having numerous attributes, such as being merciful and compassionate; that suggests a diversity within a unity.

So it's possible for God to make 2 + 2 = 5 if he wants to?

Such "reasoning" ultimately leads to solipsism of the moment.

However, Ed does not give any procedure for recognizing which objects have the same essence and which ones have different essences.

Why this obsession with some supposed "ultimate cause"?

However, if each species-to-species jump was the result of a special creation, then there must have been thousands, if not millions of special creations over the hundreds of millions of years of geological time. This was a common view in the early to mid 19th cy.; the last big-name biologist to support special creation, Louis Agassiz, had supported that view.

One of Charles Darwin's great achievements was to make a convincing case for evolution; this enabled biologists to say "Forget it!!!" to all those special creations.

And in a few cases, transitions between well-established species have been found, so they are not absolutely nonexistent.

Atheistic? Is there a non-atheistic kind of evolution that is supported?

And how does one determine that?

And how is that supposed to be the case?

GunnerJ

Hey guys, can we just ignore Ed from now on? We keep replying to him with sound arguments backed up by evidence, and he keeps jotting off pathetic one-liners of his bullshit assertions and idiotically fallicious arguments which we AGAIN counter with more logic and evidence, towards which he AGAIN spouts unevidenced assertion and lame arguments... It's like playing Pong when the enemy paddle doesn't move. It's not very hard, it's not very fun, and eventually, it just wears down your fingers.

Are there any smart, thinking theists on this board who can make an actual argument as to why the First Cause argument is useful in proving a meaningful definition of god? We've been bingeing on ice cream for a long time here, how about some meat and potatoes?

Theli

I have heard alot of claims that the chance for life in the universe is so small that it would require a creator wich deliberately made it so.

Then is it impossible that this universe might not be the only one in existance? Or the only one wich ever existed?
And that the characteristics of a universe is simply based on the outcome of it's singularity.

And then to aproach the question in another manner...
How big is the chance that we would live in a universe wich supports life? Obviously 100%

Datheron

Ed,

I'm going to take Rimstalker's cue, and let this be my last post. I note that this is not the first time I've quit on you, Ed - out of sheer frustration.

Oh, I don't really care either way. Maybe I'm just a bore to debate to.

The randomness that we see is evident in the stars - uniformity for the most part, but a lot of random scattering of stars and material that keep it from being completely uniform. On a smaller scale, the Uncertainty Principle is certainly enough to prove that randomness/chaos exists.

As for the laws of logic, I dunno how you manage to make these grandiose claims. Given a baby at birth, why is it that its language, vocabulary, and skills of reasoning improve with time, which is precisely the period that it needs to receive external input, i.e. sensory perceptions, observation? Can you detail which parts of logic are intrinstic, and which were expanded? Do you have any evidence for any claim that you make thereafter?

You're equivocating here again. Can you think of any good reason, any boundary, perhaps, that we should come to to stop extrapolating into the past? I would say the ultimate boundary is the BB, which makes sense. By the same token, is there also a boundary in space which we know signicificant differences occur (i.e. boundary)? Oh, why yes, the boundary of the Universe.

Ergo, you have proven my point at just how meaningless your definition of "essence" is.

Curiosity? Sure - but does that prove or even provide evidence that such things beyond what we know really exist? What if I'm curious as to who made God? Suddenly, God isn't God anymore!

Then we can attack those interpretations of data, if we can indeed show a link of bias and invalid interpretation. Note that with all science, once we leave the data, we must spectulate; we then strive to find further evidence to support that spectulation, which makes it into a hypothesis.

Atheistic evolution...wow. Any chance of explaining where that came from, your reasoning, and your "evidence"?

Not so simple, I'm afraid. God has a moral will, but within that moral will lies both good and evil. It is impossible for God to be wholly good, and still have a "will", for then he would have no ability to do evil, which violates the choice necessitated by what we mean by "will".

Oh, so now it's the formation of stars. Fine, you can play this little game of ignorama with someone else, as I'm bored with educating you on the BB anyway. Care to show how they contradict the laws of logic? Ah, thought not.

No crap. However, we don't know whether there was a firing squad. All we see is a mess on the ground, and we have never seen any such mess before in our lives. Therefore, we cannot assume that a firing squad hit this thing, for there is no comparison as to what would happen, say, if the firing squad missed.

Ya know, Ed, whenever I see one of your posts, I paint this image in my head not unlike the hobbits in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings smoking a pipe. In your case, though, you must be smoking something spectular, for it has robbed you of all rational and convincing thought. As such, enjoy yourself on this thread.

Ed

After thousands of generations over hundreds of years it seems the mutation would have appeared by now especially given natural selection directly guided by the breeders. Also given that so far all mutations studied result in a loss of information it is unlikely for that to occur.

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Ed: BTW, your analogy fails, 99.9% of the differences between parent and child are NOT mutations. jtb: ALL differences between parent and child are the result of mutations, as mutations are ultimately responsible for all genetic variation. It is true that most of these mutations happened in earlier generations, but each person has (on average) six new mutations in active (non-"junk") DNA. In a population of 6 billion humans, that's 36 billion mutations per generation.

Your first statement is only true if mutations can result in new information, so far that has not been found to be true. I was referring to receiving mutations directly from the parents so my statement still stands.

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Ed: In addition, genetic studies with bacteria and ancestral studies with cats have shown that all mutations so far studied result in a LOSS of information. If every time a mutation occurs there is a loss of information, macroevolution becomes impossible. JTB: This is simply not true, mutations can indeed increase information. But the Evolution/Creation forum is the best place to discuss that.

Please provide an example.

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Syn: Even with a very low resolution monster with many dysfunctional pixels, you can begin to extrapolate curves and shapes, change and equilibrium. Similarly the fossil record, although our conception of it is still developing, gives us a very good idea of the time scale of life’s evolution and the course it took. Ed: Possibly, but it also fits the effects of a global flood as it successively sampled from a biogeographically zoned distribution of organisms. jtb: No, it does not. It is absolutely impossible for a single "Great Flood" to produce the observed fossil record. It is easy to calculate that the odds against such a sequence occurring by any means other than common descent are truly astronomical, vastly greater than (for instance) the estimated number of atoms in the Universe.

How? It fits very well with a flood moving from sea to land. Slow moving invertebrate organisms would be buried first and faster moving and more intelligent land mammals and humans would be buried last.

[b] Such a sequence has never been empirically observed occurring. But anyway I am referring to the ultimate cause not the process by which the creator may have used to reach his goal of personal beings. He very well may have used directed evolution.

Ed

How?

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jtb: For instance, Allah (if he existed) would have to be a "diversity within a unity". This is because he is considered to be sentient. Any thinking creature needs to be able to handle multiple concepts, and this requires multiple brain-cells or equivalents. Furthermore, Islam includes belief in angels. Allah is far from being a "pure unity": an omnipotent being capable of complex thoughts and assisted by a host of angels is surely capable of producing a multitude of things.

No, I am referring to his essence and nature. He is a single unified personal being. Being able to handle multiple concepts is a characteristic of a single person. Of course theoretically, it is possible for him to create the universe but when studying the characteristics of the universe they fit the Christian God better as the sufficient cause because of his unified yet diverse nature and essence.

[b] From what I have read, the Brahman is ultimately all there is. It appears as though there are other beings and things but ultimately they are just an illusion. All is One. All is a unity, the diversity is an illusion. Ask your local hindu scholar.

Ed

Well there is evidence that it was labeled from its inception "according to Matthew". Read Martin Hengel's "Studies in the Gospel of Mark". Long before Papias' attribution which nevertheless is more evidence for that fact. And Papias dates to 120 AD. For more evidence read "An Introduction to the NT" by D.A. Carson. And there is evidence it was written before 70 AD a period which Matthew was probably very much alive. As far as the mistranslation, the term "them" refers to the cloaks not the animals, no there is no mistranslation. And Paul saw and met Christ on the road to Damascus.


This is the end of Part I of my response.

lpetrich

However, too-small or too-large dogs may be awkward in some way; large dogs sometimes suffer from Congenital Hip Dysplasia, suggesting that they are not completely adapted to their large size. There may be various body systems that may have to be reshaped to work well at a different size, especially a large size.

A load of dinosaur dung. Many mutations are changes in a nucleic-acid base, which keep the original amount of information. And while some larger-scale mutations are deletions, some others are gene duplications and even whole genome duplications. Gene duplications allow both the original and the copy to evolve in different directions, thus increasing the effective amount of information. And gene-sequence research has uncovered an abundance of evidence of gene duplications.

As to how this can happen, consider the process of cell division: the chromosomes have to be duplicated before the cell can split in two. If, by some accident, the cell goes back to normal without splitting, it will have two copies of all its original genetic information, becoming "polyploid".

And "polyploid speciation" is considered an very common mechanism for the the emergence of new species of plants.

This is absolutely worthless sauropod dung. Shellfish are found in all ages of strata; how was a Cenozoic clam capable of moving to higher ground while a Carboniferous dragonfly was not?

Furthermore, there is a steady turnover of species over geological time, which is apparent from their neat layering in the rocks. If nothing else, all this layering could not have been produced in a single flood, unless it was an extremely contrived flood.

What makes you so sure of animals' mental capabilities, Ed?

Social animals certainly act as if they have a conscience; consider how bees in a hive don't indiscriminately sting each other. And their heads can't contain much gray matter.

Have you ever observed God creating anything, Ed?

Why this obsession with some supposed ultimate cause?