The evolution of an atheist.

Just mostly and provisionally sure. Certainly the reverse makes a lot less sense - thinking is what minds do, minds are what brains do. The notion that thinking creates minds which create brains is precisely backwards to what we observe. I can't imagine anything less interesting than talking about what words mean, and to the extent that this is the primary focus of modern philosophy, that merely confirms my impression that philosophy has become a dumpster for questions not interesting enough to be picked up by fields that can generate real knowledge.

This. Sure I can. I'm doing it now.This, ultimately, is the greatest fiction promulgated by the philosophers - their arrogant and self-serving notion that they're crucial to all human knowledge, that their indolent masturbation somehow makes science possible. In the world of science, though, I've met only a handful of scientists who could even name a philosopher of science; philosophical issues simply aren't on the radar of real scientists because they're completely and utterly irrelevant to the project of finding out more about the world around us.Philosophy of science is just an attempt to take all the credit for other people's work. It's like Michaelangelo's pigment grinder taking credit for the Sistine chapel.

Well, I'm sorry that you've been taken in by philosophical nonsense, but that's what it is. Sure, which can't be supported logically.Why do you think that's a problem with empiricism and not with logic? Maybe it's the notion of axiomatic derivation that has the fundamental flaw, not the notion of empiric gathering of knowledge. Much valid science predates Popper. We even continue to use Mendel's genetics from over 100 years from before "The Logic of Scientific Discovery." Bayes has done far more to prevent fundamental errors in the practice of science than anything Popper has done.Every scientist I've ever met has heard of Bayes; I can think of only one who had heard of Karl Popper before I brought it up. (Largely their response to my description of his philosophy is something akin to "...and what's the punchline?") If there's a way to resolve these questions, they'll be resolved by scientists doing science, not philosophers doing philosophy. In the meantime philosophers will borrow the language of biology and physics to produce stuff indistinguishable from Sokal's classic hoax. And yet I can't find any philosophers in any science labs. I can't find Kant next to the lab manuals in any science course. My wife's new Nanodrop spectrophotometer didn't come with a manual on the philosophical implications of Beer's law. I can't find a single scientist who turns to Popper when he has a question about experimental design. But I can find legions of philosophers like Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who evince less than a freshman understanding of the science of evolution, yet pen a ridiculous strawman attack against it:

quote:

---

The authors bring to the bar two articles (one published in 1981, the other in 1993) discussing this phenomenon, but they seem completely unaware that the classic studies of Achillea these articles cite were actually conducted more than half a century ago by researchers who fully embraced natural selection and the emerging neo-Darwinian synthesis (Jens Clausen, David D. Keck and William M. Hiesey, Experimental Studies on the Nature of Species: III. Environmental Responses of Climatic Races of Achillea [Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1948]). This is a typical example of the authors’ misunderstanding of the history of evolutionary biology.

​

A more egregious case occurs when they favorably quote Ernst Mayr as protesting against what he has referred to as beanbag geneticsthe view that genes singly determine phenotypic traits. Mayr, one of the architects of neo-Darwinism, is thus called on to oppose neo-Darwinism. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini quote at length from a 1999 study by Geoffrey B. West, James H. Brown and Brian J. Enquist (Science, 284:1677—1679) concerning invariant scaling laws, which constrain phenotypic expression quite independently of natural selection; they apparently do not realize that Julian Huxley was a pioneer of this kind of allometric study in his Problems of Relative Growth (1932) and that he then integrated these very concepts of allometric constraint into his Evolution: the Modern Synthesis (1944), a classic work of neo-Darwinism.

---

So, no. I can't find any support at all for your notion that philosophy of science makes science possible. I certainly have no objections to philosophers of science attempting to observe the process of science, but I can't find any evidence at all that, from the perspective of the scientists who do science, the philosophers are doing much to inform it.

I understood your meaning, at least, and didn't think your words were mischosen - I'm certainly attacking philosophy and you're certainly defending it. No harm in describing it that way.But you're right that we're quite off-topic. Feel free to open a new topic if it's something you want to keep talking about, though I'm not sure what else I have to bring to the table. I think you know pretty well what I think, now.

I was thinking this would be a good OP for an altogether new topic. We don't want to derail your atheism discussion.

Well, how would it be?That's sort of the problem with the notion of "directed evolution"; evolution doesn't have the levers you need to direct it. You can't program evolution, you can't program environment. Evolution doesn't even happen without random heritable change; the randomness necessary for evolution to occur means that any attempt to insert a "plan" into evolution is bound to fail, because the plan gets degraded, randomly. (And we know that those random events truly are random, at a quantum level, due to Bell's Inequality.)The early universe - milliseconds after the Big Bang, as far back as we can study - doesn't have the room or the necessary diversity of state to encode enough information to specify even a millionth part of the biological complexity we see today.The notion of evolution following some kind of specified plan is just a non-starter. Occam's razor, of course, isn't evidence at all; nor is it any sort of physical principle. It's a statement about what forms of inference a given body of evidence supports or doesn't support. Well, sure. Anybody who works in a science lab has experience with more than they can perceive with their five senses. (We know as well that the human body has more than the five canonical senses - proprioception, temperature, balance, pain, magnetoception, and so on.) In order to detect those things, we construct instruments that relate data to the senses we've got.If you believe, though, that there's more than we are able to perceive by any conceivable instrumentality I think the burden of evidence is on you for that position - and, of course, given that it is only by our senses that we can know anything at all, it's not entirely clear how you could ever hope to gain any evidence or any accurate idea about something supposedly "beyond our senses." How do you know the difference between REVELATION FROM THE GREAT BEYOND and your own imagination? From what basis should we even suspect that there is?

We know that they happened randomly, though. Did you misread me? I think you must have, since the point of that information is that it precludes the possibility of a designer. The universe, at that period of time, wasn't big or diverse enough to contain the information involved in a specified plan or design. Science doesn't prove anything according to logic, which I think is the inherent flaw in logic. But according to our inherent reason, science has real, unique, demonstratable power to uncover truths about the real world.

...randomly. We know that. Bell proved that there's no way to resolve quantum mechanics as apparent randomness caused by local hidden variables; that means that quantum events that look random actually are random. There's just no room for God to be manipulating evolution by mutations that seem random but aren't; we know those mutations actually are random.We know it. Bell's Inequality was experimentally proven. No, the information didn't come at all. There's no way to set up the universe as the ultimate bank shot because the early universe itself isn't large and diverse enough to store God's plan for it.The universe doesn't need to store any information during that stage if there's no plan to evolution. Which there's not.So, there were only two possibilities allowing for guided evolution - God either sets it up as the ultimate bank shot in advance (impossible) or God manipulates random mutations along the way (also impossible.) Since we know - know - that neither of those were possible, we know that your notion of divinely-guided evolution cannot be correct.

No, but we live in the physical universe, don't we? If God is manipulating mutations, those mutations are physical, aren't they?It doesn't matter what God is, the effects of God's actions as you're proposing them are necessarily physical, because that's the only thing they could be. Columbus proved the world was round in 1492, yet centuries later it's still news to people. I think you overestimate the power of physical evidence and scientific knowledge to settle issues among those who aren't familiar with it, or have a lot to gain by ignoring it.I mean here you are, desperate to find the out that lets you maintain your faith in spite of the ample evidence against it. I mean is there any scientific evidence I could present that would disprove to you the notion that God is in control of evolution?Of course not. Why do you think it's any different for anybody else?

A "physical theory" is just a theory that explains something that is happening in the physical world. That necessarily includes mutations and any other putative divine interventions. You've never heard of the Flat Earth Society? I don't think you're aware of the extent to which truly wrong ideas permeate substantially into our society. Aside from the popular wrong stuff - religion, supply-side economics, free-market fundamentalism - there's the stuff you almost can't believe: 10% of Americans believe the moon landing was a hoax, the Flat Earth Society has thousands of members, ghosts and spooks and spectres are so widely believed there are about a dozen shows on TV, now, about real life "ghost hunters." My aunt is in a ghost hunting group, they have jackets and everything. Francis Collins is on the record already as believing that some notions are simply beyond the capacity of science to address, even if it looks like science has addressed them. He's got a lot invested in being the nation's most prominent Christian scientist (not, like, a Christian Scientist) so he's got a lot to lose by accepting what the science pretty clearly says (as, obviously, do you.) You do when you take what is most properly a scientific question and relegate it to theology. Fundamentally that's the scam being perpetrated by the "non-overlapping magisteria" crowd, that there are some questions about the physical universe that, for some reason, can't be addressed by science.Nonsense. All questions about phenomena occurring in the physical universe are accessible to science, even the non-repeatable events. If it can be said to have happened, science can address it. Couldn't Carl Sagan have simply been trying to avoid the public controversy that would surely embroil him if he ever posited a contradiction between science and theism? I mean, Carl Sagan at the time was one of the most prominent scientific unbelievers. The "New Atheism" movement had not yet begun and it was not yet accepted for someone to be an out and out atheist. People were always scrutinizing his statements and work for anti-religion notions with which to attack him.Anyway, you never answered my question. Is there any scientific evidence I could show you that would diminish your faith in your god?

I guess what I meant was, you can't do it in secret. If you want to do artificial selection you have to be there, selecting for whatever traits you're looking for.There's no way to have evolution be planned just by having the right "random" things happen. I think there's much evidence, in fact, that things happen on their own.