Summations Only

No, she suffered because she expressed her views in an inappropriate venue. She decided to express her views in that venue and lost her position, quite rightly, for doing that. She decided to teach inappropriate material, knowing that her position would be put in peril by those actions, and so it was. If she said "I decided to protest and accepted the consequences" I would have some respect for her. But she has no reason to complain about what happened. No, she was paraphrased (which you acknowledged), and paraphrased in a way that did not reflect her actual views. See Message 9 and The Big Tent and the Camel's Nose. Nowhere did she mention direct observation.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

See Message 71. From that link:

quote:

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William Dembski has responded to my January 18 Tom Jukes Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley. Others are responding on Meta and elsewhere to the focus of his essay, whether natural selection is testable, and I shall not do so here. I should, however, comment on views attributed to me.

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I was not really dealing with the testability of intelligent design (ID), though that is the impression one might get from Dembski’s essay. In this public lecture, I discussed both traditional creation science and neocreationism, and compared them. I talked about Behe’s irreducible complexity idea, and Dembski’s Design Inference, and illustrated the religious motivation for fighting evolution. I am not especially concerned with whether ID is testable. I look at the testability of ID the same way I look at the testability of traditional young-earth creationism (YEC): YEC can make empirically or logically or statistically testable statements (the earth was covered by a body of water, all living things are descended from creatures that came off a boat) but its foundational claim that everything came into being suddenly in its present form through the efforts of a supernatural creator is not a scientifically testable claim. I shall let theologians argue over whether special creationism is good theology, but invoking omnipotent supernatural causes puts one smack out of the realm of science, protestations of the validity of theistic science notwithstanding. One cannot use natural processes to hold constant the actions of supernatural forces; hence it is impossible to test (by naturalistic methodology) supernatural explanations (Scott 1998). Whether a supernatural force does or does not act is thus outside of what science can tell us.

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Similarly, ID can make empirically or logically or statistically testable claims (certain structures are irreducibly complex; by using probability arguments like the design filter one can detect design) but the foundational claim that a supernatural intelligence is behind it all is not a scientifically testable statement. (And please, let us be grownups here: we are not talking about a disembodied, vague intelligence that might be material, we are talking about God, an intelligent agent who can do things that, according to ID, mortals and natural processes like natural selection cannot. Not for nothing does Dembski say that ID is the bridge between science and theology.)

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In my talk, I was not deploring the untestability of ID per se but the fact that its proponents do not present testable models. I was referring to the fact that ID proponents do not present a model at all in the sense of saying what happened when. At least YEC presents a view of what happens: the universe appeared a few thousands of years ago, at one time, in its present form; living things are descended from specially created kinds from which they have not varied except in trivial ways; there was a universal flood that produced the modern geological features; and humans are specially created apart from all other forms. So what happened in the ID model?

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No mention of "direct observation" or anything similar. DT's "quote" is a poor paraphrase.

Of course. Nobody, especially Genie Scott, is denying that. Oh, except for the YECs who try to distingush between "observational" and "historical" sciences.The problem with the Goddidit hypothesis is not that we can't observe Him directly, but that an omnipotent Being could do anything and therefore anything we observe could have been produced by Him. there is no possibility of distinguishing between an observation produced by "natural" causes and an observation produced by His direct action.Here's a game we can play. You are the chancellor of the University of Utah in 1990. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann are in your office. You complain about the lack of replication of their cold fusion results, and they answer "It really worked at the time, but God must have changed the Universe in an undetectable way so it doesn't work anymore".What is your response?Oh and the null hypothesis for all your questions is "what we observe was produced by known natural agencies". It's your job to come up with any alternative hypotheses.

There is no number of parameters and allegedly astonishing fits that by themselves will convince me there cannot be a "natural" origin of the universe. Until we have much more data than we do we're just a puddle of water surprised by how well we fit into that depression in the road.There could be uncountable numbers of other universes with different parameters. There could be uncountable numbers of those universes that contain life so different from what we know that we can't even imagine it. You can express astonishment at how well the universe fits us (even though so much of it doesn't) but it's just handwaving until you can provide a probability calculation based on observation and measurement. And we're pretty far from being able to do that and it's likely we will be in that situation for a long time to come.Personally, I like the quantum fluctuation hypothesis, but there are lots of "naturalistic" possibilities that are not disproven by "fine-tuning". And you don't have a meaningful argument that what we see is unlikely.

That conclusion requires some hidden assumptions about probability distributions. My position is that nobody can produce a meaningful observation-based probability argument for or against the Goddidit hypothesis.

Sorry, doesn't work. You can't fire tenured professors without good reason. Why is it a problem invoking a supernatural agency in a scientific context? No matter whether or not we know what "caused" the Big Bang, if causation is even meaningful in this context, the null hypothesis for all your questions is still "what we observe was produced by known natural agencies".And there have been several hypotheses put forward to explain the Big Bang, and many of them are still possible. {ABE: as far as we know today.}So don't say they "don't work".Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

So you should stop referring to Ross's version as a quote and call it a paraphrase.And it's an obviously incorrect paraphrase, because she said nothing about "direct observation" or "laboratory conditions" or anything remotely like that, whereas "direct observation" and "laboratory conditions" are the central points of Ross's paraphrase. Nope. (And "laboratory setting" is an unwarranted addtion to her words). It's referring to the impossibility of scientifically detecting any difference between a result of "natural" means and a result of the actions of a meddling omnipotent Being, unless that Being chooses to make His actions explicit. No test we can devise can scientifically detect an omnipotent God who doesn't want to be detected (for whatever reason that we can't comprehend). And nobody has ever come up with a means for testing for or detecting the effects of a creator God without the cooperation of that God. I suppose you think Ross has, but we'll get to that. Obviously she has, and you and Ross haven't.

You need to quantify "extreme". No. The choice of 20 or more needs to be justified. "Living universe" needs to be defined explicitly, connecting the possibility of life (not necessarily life as we know it -- this is important) mathematically to the parameters of the Universe. You need to demonstrate that the parameters are independent of each other. You need to demonstrate that your proposed agency exists. Edited by JonF, : "more" was "less"... whoopsie

I can't find any trace of such a proof, and I'm pretty good at Googling. Please provide a working link, preferably to a text site rather than a video.He definitely does believe in a cyclic universe, but that rather disproves your claim, doesn't it? Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity.I do find Before the Big Bang: an Outrageous New Perspective and its Implications for Particle Physics wherein he raises an issue of how the low entropy of the early universe came to be, but there is a lot of argument in physics circles about whether this is an issue and how, if it is an issue, it might be resolved. Certainly that paper isn't a proof of impossibility of naturalistic origins and there are plenty of people attempting to "defeat or contradict" the issue.Given your propensity to add to what people wrote and claim you are quoting, I strongly suspect that you have colossally misrepresented Penrose's position.

The paper I linked to is from 2006. So his view of the low entropy problem remained the same more recently than 30 years ago. I don't know when, if ever, he changed his mind.Of course, if indeed that's what DT is hanging his hat on, it doesn't fly (mixing my metaphors muchly).

The Casimir effect is due to quantum fluctuation, but is not in itself a quantum fluctuation. "Quantum fluctuation" covers a lot more ground than "Casimir effect".

The fact that, if you don't include virtual particles in the calculations, the answers come out wrong. The fact that we can detect them in ways other than the Casimir effect. Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence? Or are they merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics?
Virtual Particles: What are they?Really? Please provide references or a proof. Yeah, but you don't have to trash the entire law of COE. You just have to modify it: "energy is conserved unless it's created and destroyed fast enough that the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle allows it. Oh, and if we're talking about cosmic scales General Relativity tells us energy is not necessarily conserved."This has been so since at least the mid 20th century.

Static electrical force, magnetic force, near-field pattern of radio antennas, induction fields (internals of transformers, and MRI, ...), Lamb shift, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, Van der Walls force (which is really the Casimir effect again), Hawking radiation (detection of Hawking radiation has been claimed but is not universally accepted).This list is not necessarily exhaustive.

That's an unsupported assertion. I asked for a reference or proof.

After all this blather you can't bring yourself to present, much less defend, this alleged model.The tests discussed in the last thread were mainly attempts to sneak creationist ideas into science.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.