TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

Right! There are lots of people who look at real-world evidence and the evolutionary perspective on that, and say "ok, that makes sense," but then look at the creation myth in Genesis, try to imagine any sort of literal interpretation of that, and say "huh? I don't understand how that has anything at all to do with reality." You've got that quite wrong. Evolution has nothing to do with atheism. Evolution has to do with understanding, on the basis of objective evidence, how life actually works. You can certainly overlay that understanding with any amount of supernatural interpretation or elaboration that suits you. Honestly, that's ok -- just so long as you don't push your personal, non-objective notions to the point of denying / ignoring clear evidence, or closing off the pursuit of new evidence.As for what supports atheism, that's something else entirely: it's the general disarray and incompatibility among the vast number of distinct theistic beliefs, and impossibility of providing any objective rationale for any one theistic belief. I'll stress that this is not a matter of "dogma" on the part of any atheist. Rather, it's simply a natural reaction to the conflicting (and baseless) dogmas that can be found in all religions. The importance of God in evolution is a matter of personal preference, and there's no limitation on that, except that it's shameful or pathetic to deny or ignore evidence that has been established firmly and repeatedly, simply because it doesn't support a particular (and frankly strange) interpretation of certain passages in biblical text.Accepting the evidence for evolution (and an old earth, and an older universe) does not entail belief in a "weak" God. You can still make as many assertions as you like about God's omni-everything, and they still have the same truth value they had before Darwin wrote his book (and before we measured the speed of light and figured out red-shift in astronomy and learned about radioactivity and DNA and...)What you can't do now, given the amount of evidence we have, is make assertions that all physical phenomena have occurred within the last 8000 years or less, or that particular events (global flood, Tower of Babel) actually occurred at particular times, based solely on a particular interpretation of biblical text, because those assertions are simply refuted by too much real-world evidence, and the biblical text simply doesn't work as objective data. It's just like asserting that the earth is flat.I'll agree that the case for atheism gets stronger as we increase our understanding of physical reality and the natural processes that operate in it. Improving our understanding of ourselves is also helpful in this regard. One important purpose in the conception of any deity is to have a way of verbalizing an explanation for things we don't understand. Once we actually become able to understand these things in objective terms, the deistic "explanation" becomes obsolete.Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Hi Kaichos Man. Thanks for mentioning "neutral theory" -- I wasn't actually aware of that term before seeing your post, and having it looked it up, it's an interesting topic.Quoting from Neutral theory of molecular evolution - Wikipedia

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Neutral theory does not contradict natural selection, nor does it deny that selection occurs.

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I presume this is what you view as "holding out the required olive branch to Darwinists"?The dates on these theories (late 1960's, early 1970's) led me to wonder whether your own interest has followed this topic into the more recent developments. Here's another section from the wikipedia article:

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As of the early 2000s, the neutral theory is widely used as a "null model" for so-called null hypothesis testing. Researchers typically apply such a test when they already have an estimate of the amount of time that has passed since two species or lineages divergedfor example, from radiocarbon dating at fossil excavation sites, or from historical records in the case of human families. The test compares the actual number of differences between two sequences and the number that the neutral theory predicts given the independently estimated divergence time. If the actual number of differences is much less than the prediction, the null hypothesis has failed, and researchers may reasonably assume that selection has acted on the sequences in question. Thus such tests contribute to the ongoing investigation into the extent to which molecular evolution is neutral.

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How is it, exactly, that you interpret this to mean that "their research really showed what a load of cobblers positive selection of mutations is"? It looks to me like their findings have been incorporated into the ToE, to the general benefit of scientific progress. {AbE:} To put that more clearly, it looks like the findings of Kimura and Ohno have provided a quantitative basis for identifying the occurrence of positive selection, which is something quite different from disproving or dismissing it.If this point is actually true (can you cite some specific reference for this?): this might simply reflect the personal interests that Kimura had at the time. It is a normal situation, given how scientists tend to get very specialized in their pursuits, that they consider some things "not worth bothering with", but that tends to be a personal view on the part of a given scientist as a result of his current focus, and does not necessarily reflect a negative view toward the actual value of the fields he doesn't choose to pursue.Edited by Otto Tellick, : grammar patchEdited by Otto Tellick, : added to comment about 2nd wikipedia quote, as noted in textEdited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

I'm like you, Kaichos Man, in the sense that I have no formal training in biology and do not practice that branch of science myself. I just read what biologists write and I try to understand. But it's in this last point that I think you and I differ, because I get the sense from your reply that you don't really understand, and you aren't really trying to. Notice what prediction it is that we're talking about. As I understand it (and I hope some real biologists here will correct me if I'm wrong), this sentence, just before the one you quoted:

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The test compares the actual number of differences between two sequences and the number that the neutral theory predicts given the independently estimated divergence time.

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is saying that Kimura's Neutral Theory predicts a specific rate of mutations in a lineage over time (and this prediction is based on carefully observed evidence). Given data from two distinct generations separated by a known period of time, if the difference between them is significantly less than the predicted difference, some other factor must have affected the process of descent with modification, and that factor is called "natural selection". That's twisted to the point that you are making no sense. Belief has nothing at all to do with any of this. It's a matter of having an evidence-based prediction about the extent of difference between two stages in a lineage, and then comparing/contrasting that against the actual observed difference in order to understand the factors that account for the difference. More twisting of terms into tortuous nonsense. You seem to have some notion of how "null" is used in science that is completely at odds with how it's actually used. (Objective research uses the term "null hypothesis" to refer to one of two possible outcomes in a statistical study; there is no notion of a "null theory".)You also seem to have some faith-based reason for rejecting evidence that supports natural selection, and this is something I don't understand, given the fact that there is no evidence-based reason for rejecting it.Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor rewording for clarity

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.