|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
Summations Only | Thread ▼ Details |
Member (Idle past 3862 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Can science say anything about a Creator God? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
Yes, she suffered because of her views 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.
Then Eugenie Scott claimed science was "limited to direct observations of events occurring in nature or under controlled laboratory conditions." Except she didn't. Again, this is not true. Eugenie was quoted correctly 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
Then you won't have any problem providing the original source so that we can see the context for the quoted phrases, will you ? See Message 71. From that link:
quote: No mention of "direct observation" or anything similar. DT's "quote" is a poor paraphrase.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
Scientists detect things which are not directly observable regularly 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
You may say, if the fine-tuning only involves six parameters and the tuning has a range of 25%, then I would consider that to be not extremely fine-tuned. It could well be these numbers result from pure chance. You may also say, if the fine-tuning involves 20 parameters and the universe falls apart if the value of those parameters is off by 1%, then that is extreme fine-tuning and the universe has to be the result of an intelligent Creator. 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
So, yes, given a fine-tuned universe assumption, science can say something about a Creator Christian God... it is then 97.5% likely that this God does not exist. 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
What is your response?
I would say: "Your fired!" 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?
e have no natural agencies to explain the Big Bang. A couple of hypotheses have been put forward, including a vacuum fluctuation and colliding branes. But these don't work 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
Ross must feel use of the terms "direct observations" and "laboratory conditions" was justified by her phrase "One cannot use natural processes to hold constant the actions of supernatural forces." 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.
It is kind of an odd phrase but it seems to refer to the impossibility of controlling God or his actions while in a laboratory setting. 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).
but not everyone would agree that it is the only way to test for or attempt to detect the effects of a Creator God. 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.
It appears Eugenie has not thought the issue through clearly. Obviously she has, and you and Ross haven't.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
My alternate hypothesis is that the universe shows signs of an intelligent Creator if the fine-tuning is extreme and not likely the result of pure chance. You need to quantify "extreme".
My alternate hypothesis would be confirmed if the number of fine-tuned parameters were 20 or more and if the "living universe" range of values were 0.1 percent of the observed value. Does this make sense? 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
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
Roger Penrose has mathematically shown any naturalistic cause for the Big Bang to be beyond any realm of chance. As far as I know, no one has even attempted to defeat or contradict his proof. 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
But he said this back in 1981. Given that as recently as 2010 he was proposing that the Big Bang may have been preceded by an earlier universe, have you considered the possibility that he doesn't today and never did view has work from 30 years ago as precluding natural causes? 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).
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
I did address the most popular one of quantum fluctuations 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".
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
So what is it exactly that makes this "belief" any more valid than your typical run of the mill creationist? 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? Some sort of universes parameters are needed to have a fluctuation Really? Please provide references or a proof.
And finally, if we are really observing new particles form in the casimir experiments then you've got to trash the entire law of conservation of energy which says this is impossible. 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
So are you trying to say there is some other process we have "observed" that indicates how we might get something from nothing? 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.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
Some sort of universes parameters are needed to have a fluctuation
Really? Please provide references or a proof. That's an unsupported assertion. I asked for a reference or proof.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 198 days) Posts: 6174 Joined:
|
It appears to me that Hugh Ross has figured out what to make of it and has developed a reasonable and testable creation model. 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.
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024