Summations Only

Hi, DT.I'm terribly confused right now. Let me summarize all the salient points of your opening post here:

1. Some scientists say that science cannot comment on supernatural things, like the existence of a Creator.
2. Some scientists say that science can comment on the supernatural, and has concluded that there is no Creator.
3. Some creationists think the Big Bang points to a Creator.
4. I (designtheorist) think science can comment on the existence of a Creator.

This is just a survey of various people's opinions, with no real substance to talk about. So, what, exactly, are we supposed to be discussing here?Are there some particular points of reasoning that you want to discuss? Like, for instance, "Is science restricted to working with direct observations?" or "In what way does the Big Bang point to a Creator?" or "Does nature do 'one-time events'?"Or, do you just want to tally everybody's opinion, then "summarize" the thread by restating your own opinion, like you did on the last thread?

Hi, DT. Fair enough. But, these were really just superficial summaries, and the reasoning and evidence behind them remain unclear.For example, your anecdotes about Ross and Sandage indicate that their "scientific evidence" for creationism amounts to a faulty use of logic (specifically, affirming the consequent): I do not accept the initial premise: it has not been demonstrated that a discrete beginning to the universe necessitates a Creator. Therefore, the existence of a discrete beginning to the universe is not evidence for the existence of a Creator.In the absence of evidence, I have to remain silent on whether or not the Big Bang points to a Creator.Most lines of reasoning that attempt to support the existence of the Creator have ended the same way for me. So, based on this history of personal experience, my current opinion is that a Creator can only be concluded from fallacious logic. This makes me highly skeptical toward the idea of a Creator. But, I stop short of believing that science can definitively rule out a supernatural Creator.

Hi, DT. I don't understand why it's so important to separate this debate into all these different phases.You stated flatly in the last thread that you didn't expect a consensus, we didn't reach one, you left prematurely, and everybody was left wondering what the point of it was.Are your expectations for this thread the same?You seem to think that it's vital that we get these preliminary debates out of the way before we move on to the big debate. But, if we don't reach a consensus on any of these threads, we haven't really gotten them out of the way. So, it seems rather pointless to separate them like this. I don't know. If I knew what evidence in favor of the supernatural would look like, that would seem to imply that I know enough about how the supernatural works to make predictions based on it. But, I'm relatively confident that I don't have the slightest idea how the supernatural would work if it existed.So, I can't make predictions nor give you any indication of what evidence might make me believe in the supernatural.

Hi, DT. You missed your calling as a cheerleader. Or motivational speaker. Why don't you go do that instead? You throw around the word "detect" here like it's a simple thing, like you can just crunch some numbers, turn the calculator upside-down, and it spells "DESIGN." Then you say, "See? We detected design!"Nobody has "detected" dark matter. What they have done is some math that suggests the universe should have more matter than we can detect. Since this math is highly successful at explaining and predicting the operations of the universe, scientists hypothesize that there must be some undetectable matter that makes up the difference.The situation is subtly, but importantly, different for design. The astrophysicists have math that clearly identifies the "gap" in their theory. They can tell you roughly how much matter they need to fill that gap, and they can even produce some rather detailed descriptions of hypothetical particles or objects that could fill the gap (see here for a brief overview of the various hypotheses and solutions that might fit the bill).In contrast, the designists also see gaps in theories, but they just kind of shrug and say, "A Designer or Creator fills that gap." But, none of you has ever been able to do any math that can estimate or extrapolate the characteristics of the Designer you would need to fill that gap. That makes it impossible to work with as a hypothesis, because it's not a hypothesis until you restrict it to a specific mechanism of action. I think I'll need more than a three-sentence paragraph to "get me started on the Big Bang." Perhaps I'll need to go back and take a third semester of college physics, since my first two semesters only got me to things like Ohm's Law.But, if I think like a creationist, surely I can assume that I have something meaningful to say on a topic for which I have no qualifications. For example, I know that there's something called a "redshift" somewhere in that Big Bang Theory: so, maybe a Designer would have caused something different. Like, a yellowshift. Now, what does a yellowshift look like, and how to I go about finding one so I can prove Intelligent Design?Or, perhaps you could ask me something about voltage and current instead? I don't even know how to measure fine-tuning. Does it come in teaspoons, perhaps? Shall we set the standard at 8 teaspoons? Clearly, anything with more than 8 teaspoons of fine-tuning would have to have been designed. In my opinion, anyway. No, I cannot. On the "Origin of Novelty" thread, starting with this post, I tried to do just that: I tried to extrapolate, based on human principles of design, a few predictions of what an Intelligent Designer would have done. But, I was shot down because my predictions were too restrictive. The ultimate decision by Mindspawn was that a Designer could do whatever the hell they wanted, and there was no way that I could force IDists to accept a hypothesis that restricts the Designer to doing anything specific.If I can't be specific, I can't make it into a hypothesis, I can't make predictions with it, and I can't test it. It isn't my fault.-----You'll notice that I gave you a "Cheer" for your message 99. That's because you actually did the work yourself, instead of requesting that we do it for you.But, I still think both your null and alternate hypotheses crap. You defined "fine-tuning" in terms of some undefined set of parameters, and set some arbitrary percentage of whatever scale each parameter is measured on as your cut-off point for "fine-tuning," and then somehow conclude that the universe could only match this "fine-tuned" parameter configuration if it was done intentionally.

Hi, DT. That's a bit hypocritical, don't you think? After all, you didn't do your own thinking on this: you read a book that someone else wrote, and decided that you liked his ideas, so you latched on to them. Maybe you thought about them a bit on your own, but only after they were presented to you. But, for some reason, you believe we won't grasp it unless we do all our thinking before you present Ross's ideas to us.Personally, I could spend days on end reading and thinking about Big Bang cosmology, and still not understand it well enough to know what I should predict under what circumstances. People who actually can do that have trained for significantly longer than "days on end" to get there.I'm a biologist. I have just completed my 8-9 years of training in biology, and I know the subject well enough that I am confident in my ability to "do my own thinking" and come up with my own predictions in a lot of areas of biology. If you want to talk about design hypotheses in biology, I'm your man.But, I am not a physicist. I am not well equipped to work with the subject matter, and I wouldn't trust my reasoning and my conclusions about physics. If I want to understand something in physics, I am entirely dependent on some physicist explaining it to me.And, frankly, so are you.

Hi, DT.Perhaps I've been a little too irritable toward you on this thread, and I'm sorry for that. However, I am irritated with the way you seem to reason entirely n false dichotomies and false correlations. Like this here: So, the only two possibilities are (1) be willing to consider intelligent design or (2) advance an anti-ID agenda?There are a lot of hypotheses that science has rejected in the past. Does intellectual honesty require that we be equally willing to consider phlogiston theory, the geocentric model, spontaneous generation, and the classical elements, as well? To put it bluntly, it is not clear that you want your thinking challenged.On your last thread, you stated that you wanted to debate a certain set of points, but, throughout the discussion, you continually reiterated your position without directly engaging any of the arguments we made against that position.On this thread, you ask what would make us consider a hypothesis based on Intelligent Design. You haven't presented us any specific hypothesis that we could evaluate, so we can't give you any clear answers as to what evidence would convince us of its veracity. You have also stated that one's willingness to consider ID is directly correlated with one's intellectual honesty. What you're sensing is irritation. You can't judge our willingness to confront evidence for a hypothesis when you haven't even told us what the hypothesis is!

Hi, DT. I imagine it must be terribly frustrating for you. I've been in your position, and I know how frustrating it is when nobody else seems capable of understanding something that seems to obvious to you.Maybe someday you'll equate that frustration with cognitive dissonance, and recognize what it means. Or, maybe you'll continue to be frustrated at how stupid everybody else is. I don't know, but I'm genuinely sorry that I seem to have only exacerbated your frustration. I can't do anything with this "new" model, because you haven't presented it yet. So, all I can talk about is the generic idea of creation or intelligent design.These generic ideas have been rejected for the same reason that the phlogiston theory and geocentric model were rejected. That's the only comparison I have attempted to make between these ideas: they are obsolete scientific ideas that haven't been serious contenders in scientific circles for a very long time. Maybe this RTB model is different, but what reason have you given me to believe that?I've been on EvC for almost as long as I've been a professional scientist: five years. In that relatively short time, I've seen my fair share of creationists claiming to have stumbled upon some new model that completely changes everything. But, from my perspective, it always seems like the same ol' creationism described with some different words.That's the history you're contending with. You may very well have a fantastic, new idea that will revolutionize science; but, at this point, you sound to me just like a dozen others that have come before you. It's not your fault that we're all so jaded, and it's unfortunate for you that you have to contend with that, but a person does get so tired of trying to make an honest effort to consider everybody's "new" version of creationism all the time. Your questions and opportunities are not as scientific as you think they are. You asked what evidence would lead us to consider intelligent design. You might as well asked me what evidence would lead me to consider grooglesnark. I don't know what grooglesnark is, so I can't tell you what evidence might lead me to consider it as a scientific hypothesis.In the same vein, I don't know what you mean when you say "intelligent design." I don't know what tools your intelligent designer might have been using to design, I don't know what personality traits might be influencing your designer's specific design decisions, I don't know what laws of physics your designer might have used to design and create the laws of physics for our universe, and I don't know what your designer's purpose or motivation is for designing. If I don't know specifics like this, then I can't tell you what evidence would lead me to accept this design hypothesis.I have tried to make predictions based on intelligent design in the past. I have stated that I would accept X or Y as evidence for intelligent design. Creationists then present me with some extremely dubious and unconvincing examples that are vaguely similar to the X and Y I identified, or they complain that my standards are misguided.Please present your model, and I will gladly attempt to determine what evidence I would accept as supporting it.

Hi, DT. This is because I don't think it's possible to wrestle with the evidence you've suggested. I don't know how to determine whether the universe is fine-tuned, because I don't know how to determine the likelihood of a given set of universe parameter values.See, for each parameter relevant to this fine-tuning topic, we would need to know the probability distribution. That is, what range of values are possible for each parameter? And, what is the probability of each value in that range?Let's say that one parameter could theoretically take on any of ten values. Are each of these ten values equally likely? Or, are some of the values more likely than others?If we knew these probability distributions, we could easily calculate the overall probability of any given set of parameter values. Then, maybe we could use a standard statistical technique, like p-values or bootstrapping, to decide whether or not to reject the null hypothesis that the universe's set of parameters is random.But, how do we determine these probability distributions? How do we know what range of values is possible for each parameter? How do we know how likely each value in that range is, relative to each other value? We can't assign a probability to any parameter value or set of parameters if we don't have a reasonable estimate for the probability distribution.I do not think that there is a reasonable estimate for the probability distribution of universe-parameter sets, so I don't think it's possible to determine how fine-tuned a universe is. Also, I have no idea how much apparent fine-tuning would be sufficient for me to reject the null hypothesis of no design.It's not that I'm not willing to engage any evidence, or that I'm just being evasive: it's that your question is fundamentally unanswerable with the evidence that exists.Edited by Blue Jay, : No reason given.

Hi, DT. You missed the point of my post. The salient points were two questions that expose the problems with your technique. Your response was to restate the technique whose flaws I was exposing. This is a prime example of what I was talking about earlier, that you're not engaging the criticisms we're providing.Here are the two questions I asked:

1. How do they determine what ranges of values are possible for each parameter?
2. And, how do they determine what the probability of each possible value is?

Standard practice in science is to record values from a sample of data points (in this case, the sample would be a bunch of universes), and assume that the values in the entire population of interest (in this case, the population would be all universes) are distributed the same way as in the sample. Then, you can use the statistics of your sample to infer the parameters of your population.But, this obviously doesn't apply in this context, since the sample can only have a single data point. With only one data point, you can't resolve a probability distribution.So, how do you determine what the probability distribution looks like? I don't know how to express fine-tuning in terms of percentages and numbers of parameters.It seems like you expect me to accept that each parameter has a specific value that corresponds with its "fine-tuned" value. You then expect me to accept that the number of different parameters whose values fall within a certain vicinity to their fine-tuned values would somehow indicate the likelihood of design.But, how do we decide which values for each parameter represent "fine-tuned" values?
Do we determine it based on how conducive it is to supporting life? That seems rather circular to me. But, let's run with it.So, how do we know which parameter values are most conducive to supporting life?
Do we examine a bunch of universes, and see which ones support the most life?
Do we take random life forms from our universe and subject them to the conditions of different universes?
Or, do we just assume that parameter values close to our universe's values are the best for supporting life?Do you see the problems yet?

Hi, DT.I apologize for the delay: I'm in the middle of a move across the country. The college-level variant of an old wives' tale always starts with "There have been studies done that show..."Would you have accepted that from me? What level of fine-tuning, eh? Let's go with 7.84. Does that sound good to you? Your answer to #4 contradicts your answer to #1. You methodology is to take your sample size of 1 (Earth), assume that all possible forms of life must require the same conditions as we observe for that one data point, then choose universe parameters based on how they might lead to those conditions. Clearly, you're just assuming that parameter values close to our universe's parameter values are required for life.