Peanut Gallery

I hadn't even gotten around to reading back to RAZD's op until now but it's truly astounding.

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Curiously I do not need to claim, assert or believe that "supernatural being (X) can exist" -- all I need to do is present you with a concept of a supernatural being, like supernatural being (X), and then it is your task to demonstrate, with objective empirical valid evidence, that these concepts are unequivocally and absolutely a fictional invention and not a supernatural being.

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How is this not a violation of rule 4? Frankly I think RAZD's entire conduct throughout that "debate" should be the focus of moderator attention. He's unresponsive to rebuttals, doesn't keep a "narrow focus", engages in misrepresentation, and engages in "needling, hectoring and goading tactics."How long are we going to let this go on before we recognize that Bluegenes won it almost immediately? I think there should be a call for closing posts and the topic closed.

I don't know. What does "supernatural" mean?

Could you elaborate on what you think they're not being sufficiently skeptical about?Because from my perspective, the one who promotes the supernatural (as you do) is by definition the one being the least skeptical.Also do you think you could increase the quality of your posts in your Great Debate thread? So far you've not even once meaningfully replied to Bluegenes.

This is why you can't be taken seriously on this subject.I wish it was possible to nominate you for worst post of the month.

No, you're the one with no evidence. My evidence is Robert Peary's 1909 expedition and the 2007 "Polar Special" episode of the top-rated UK car program Top Gear.What evidence have you provided for the non-made-up-ness of any supernatural being? What evidence have you provided that you've answered the very simple questions put to you? You asked, at one point, whether it was reasonable to conclude that you would ever take temporary leave of your senses and being posting things that were not reasonable. That strikes me as a fairly dangerous question for someone in your position to ask. Do you really want to know what people have told me about the condition of your mental faculties? I've been trying not to be personal, but your aggressive idiotic nonsense and crowing really is becoming tiresome, and the notion that you would get a POTM really is the last straw. You're doing yourself a tremendous disservice with these constant evasions, and it's only been out of personal respect for the intelligent person you used to be that I've not pursued this any further. But if you're going to insist on being a crowing douche about it, we can tangle.

I'm not making an argument against your position based on the consequences; I'm making an argument against your behavior based on the consequences. Additionally I've not made the argumentum ad hominem either; the imprecations I've made against your person have nothing to do with your position.You really need to be more careful before you make accusations of logical fallacies I haven't made. Apparently you don't understand the difference between a personal attack and the argumentum ad hominem. I don't understand "is possible that they may exist." That utterance communicates no information. Is it possible that they exist, or might they exist? I don't see how it can be possible that they might exist, at the same time. Can you elaborate and provide evidence for your view? You've been asked, however, what other source is known. And I'll ask you as well - what other source is known? Show your evidence for these alternate sources. I did, and I told you what it was. Did you take any time to review it, or did you just decide to ignore it and lie to me?

No, it's not. Bluegenes isn't making the assertion that there are other sources of supernatural beings; RAZD is. And it's incumbent on RAZD to present evidence for that view, which he refuses to do.

This evinces a faulty understanding of probability, most notably the popular myth that the probabilities of things that happened in the past are bivalent; i.e. "1 if they happened" and "0 if they didn't."Probability is a comparison between outcomes and the outcome space, and the equations for that have no term for time. As you can see:No term for time; the function P(a) ("the probability of outcome a") returns the same value regardless of whether the event occurred in the past (and thus the result is already known) or is expected to occur in the future (and thus the result is not yet known.) Probabilities in the past are not "one or zero" because probability is the comparison between the outcome and the outcome space, and neither of those change simply because the event occurred in the past or the future.The result of this is that we absolutely can specify "in between conditions of knowledge" because neither the outcome nor the outcome space will change based on our knowledge about where pens are. If the pen is on the desk, that doesn't change the a priori probability that the pen was on the desk. If the a priori probability was very low, but we found the pen there anyway, that is a very significant outcome. This forms the basis of "Bayesian probability", the notion that low-probability events are more significant than high-probability ones. No. Spacial-location probabilities are not based on the number of areas where the object could be found, but on the area of the areas where the object could be found integrated with the distance of the area from the object's current location. So, no, you do not create a probability of "1/2" by eliminating the desk.You're really demonstrating either a deeply flawed understanding of probability here, or a willingness to pervert even mathematics in service of your religious beliefs. I continue to grieve for the medical misfortune that has befallen one of EvC's once-brightest intellects. Not so. Probability is based on the comparison between outcomes and the outcome space. Only in the most textbook cases can the outcome space be fully known but that's not necessary in establishing probability to a significant degree of reliability; the outcome space is dominated, after all, by the most likely probabilities.

If he didn't name them, how do you know he knew them?I don't understand from what basis you can conclude that the ancient writer knew all of the elements of the molecular constitution of the human body simply on the basis of writing that the human body was formed from dust. But dust isn't loam; dust actually lacks many of the necessary elements for life. Dusts are, for the most part, fine-grained silica and lack nitrogen, phosphorus, and other crucial nutrients for growth. That's why you can't grow anything in dusts. So he didn't know it because it was not available, and that somehow proves that the Genesis writer knew things that were not available at the time.Can anybody make heads or tails of this? ICANT is making even less fucking sense than usual. Did the Genesis writer know the molecular constitution of the human body, as you claimed, or didn't he?

Except that he didn't write about them. He didn't write anything at all about the elemental constitution of the human body, you've agreed that he didn't know anything about the elemental constitution of the human body, so precisely what is being assumed to be supernatural here?Human bodies aren't made of soil, and even if they were Genesis says dust, not soil, and dust actually doesn't contain nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, or much of anything at all besides silica. You've presented information that was available to you - the elemental composition of the human body - that isn't in the Bible. Somehow you're trying to argue that because the Bible doesn't specify the elemental composition of the human body, that proves that the information wasn't available to the writers of the Bible. Obviously! How on Earth does that prove anything supernatural? Right, but you've already agreed that the ancestors didn't have any information about the elemental composition of the Bible. So, what information did the ancestors have that was not available to them? Be specific. Human bodies are not made from dust or soil, and dusts have no nitrogen, phosphorus, or carbon.

What information? Earlier you claimed the information was the complete elemental composition of the human body, but now you've admitted that that information isn't contained in Genesis, and you've asserted that the reason it's not in Genesis is because that information was never made available to the Genesis writer. Well, yeah. So what information are we talking about, specifically?The information that human bodies are made from dust? That's not actually something that is true, that's make-believe. Bodies are not made from dust. Dust is primarily fine-grained silica; human bodies are primarily made from water.Also - I asked you to be specific. Why were you general, instead?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

I can't say except in reference to a specific calculation you had in mind. Regardless - yes, when evolutionists say "it happened in the past so the odds are 1!" that's a spurious and fallacious counter. Probability calculations have no term for time, as you can see. Right, but those possibilities are not equiprobable. Given that the pen is somewhere in the room, the probability that the pen is on the desk is the area of the desk divided by the area of the room. A coin has only one head and one tails, and the head and tails of a coin are the same size. In a fair flip of the coin, the heads outcome is equiprobable with the tails outcome. That's the reason for the 50/50 odds, not the fact that a coin has only two faces. An unbalanced coin also has only two faces, but by definition its odds are not 50/50; an unbalanced coin favors heads or tails to some extent. No, I specifically stated that the probability is not "both 1 and 0", and again, even if you find the pen on the desk, the probability that you would find the pen on the desk is not "1." Assuming that events that did occur are the sole representative of the outcome space is fallacious. Things that did happen are not automatically of probability 1 and things that did not happen are not automatically of probability 0. Equations of probability have no term for time. The probability you're asking for is "is one minute out of the day at random either between noon and midnight, or between midnight and noon?" and the answer to that is 50/50, since half of a day's minutes are between noon and midnight and the other half are between midnight and noon. Probability allows us to quantify uncertainty, so while we cannot in any but the most degenerate cases explicitly specify the outcome space, we can usually express our confidence in any estimation of the outcome space and therefore the certainty, between 0 and 1, we can have in our conclusions drawn thereof. No, but we can quantify the uncertainty that our lack of knowledge introduces, and decide for ourselves whether we're sufficiently confident in our conclusions to consider them valid. Absolute knowledge is not required to have a practical level of knowledge about things. No, because these possibilities are not equiprobable - the odds that the pen is on the desk are much higher than the odds that you are mistaken that there ever was a pen, because that's a mistake that people very rarely make. Pens do exist and they frequently exist in the vicinity of desks.Again, you're making mistakes as you construct the outcome space. Suppose you have a weighted "cheaters" coin. It is balanced in such a way that, no matter how you flip it, it comes up heads 75% of the time. You flip the coin. What are the odds it comes up tails?By your reasoning, since it has only heads and tails, you conclude 1/2. But I've already told you, it comes up heads 75% of the time. You're forced to conclude that 25% or more the coin comes up simultaneously heads and tails, an impossibility.Do you see how your unwarranted assumption of equiprobability of all outcomes is faulty, now? Absence of evidence is always evidence of absence, because when things are absent, the leave an absence of evidence of their existence. This is a principle that everyone understands to be true; it's how they know when to go to the store for milk - the absence of evidence for the presence of milk in their fridge."Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is simply a popular misunderstanding of what evidence is.

Well, but that's the point of contention, here. What would be "positive evidence" of a pen not being on the desk, besides an absence of evidence that there's a pen on the desk?You're assuming what you've been asked to prove, in other words. What constitutes evidence of no pens except a lack of pens? What else could there be?

And why do you think there's no pen? And why do you think there's no pen?

"The coin is not balanced" isn't an outcome in the outcome space, so, no, it's not a possibility we need to know about. If the coin isn't balanced that will emerge in the distribution of outcomes; the likelihood of one face will be less than the other.We don't need to know, a priori, whether the coin is balanced or not - we can flip it and empirically determine the balance. This is incorrect. Again, this equation:which is the universal probability function for any event a, has no term for time.I mean, do you think I'm lying to you about that? Prove me wrong. Where is the term for time in this equation? (Traditionally lower-case t is the symbol for "time", usually in seconds, in an equation.) If the mathematical basis for probability has no term for time, as you can plainly see, then what on Earth could be the basis for your conclusion that probabilities are dependent on whether the event was in the past or is in the future? No, it doesn't. As you can plainly see there's no factor of time in the function P(a), so clearly time is not being factored in. What is being "factored" is that half of the minutes in a day have one characteristic, and the other half have the opposite characteristic, and therefore the odds that a random minute out of the day has one characteristic and not the other is 1/2. Time is not a factor in this calculation; there is no term for time in P(a). If you disagree, show me the term for time in P(a). Not really, and you've completely ignored the point. So you agree that the outcomes are not equiprobable. Then why did you assert that they were equiprobable? Well, this is clearly inaccurate. The probability of the pen being on the desk decreases as the ratio of area of the desk to the area of the room decreases. Inversely it increases as the area of the desk increases relative to the area of the room, such that if the room is literally no larger than the desk (and therefore the surface of the desk is also the floor of the room) then the probability that the pen is on the desk given that it is in the room is 100%.In other words the possibilities are not equiprobable. Rolling two dice and summing the result produces values between 2 and 12, but those values are not equiprobable; the odds of getting 7 aren't 1 in 11, they're 1 in 6. I'm actually a 6 due to a position I hold about the maximum justifiable certainty of propositions, and 6 is the only logically tenable position on the Dawkins spectrum. Please correct your notes. I'm not asserting that a proposition is necessarily false because it has not been proven true; I'm asserting that absence of evidence is evidence of absence (not proof of absence) because when things are absent, an absence of evidence is the necessary result. Something that is absent is not present to give evidence.When one man asserts the existence of blue fairies at the South Pole, and another man denies the existence of such fairies, the lack of any evidence for blue fairies at the South Pole does not equally support both their positions. Rather, that lack of evidence is evidence for the latter position. That's only a logical fallacy if you believe that conclusions can never be tentative. It amuses me that you think that fallacies are the beginning and end of reason. The fact that some true things are also logical fallacies should indicate to you that logic has critical flaws that preclude it's use as a tool to understanding what is real in the universe. Logic is applicable only to axiomatic systems, which the universe is not. Empiricism is how we understand the universe, and empirically, an absence of evidence is evidence of absence.