Summations Only

Well that did not take long, and was essentially cost free. You simply declared a naturally created universe impossible. This scientific method stuff sure is cheap when done right.

Hi DesignTheorist,Let me begin where you ended: I have not as yet made any false assertions about you, only true ones. I have called to your attention three occasions on which you made false assertions. The reason we can know that my assertions are true and yours are false are that mine are corroborated by facts from reality while yours are contradicted by them. Addressing your false assertions one at a time:

1. Caroline Crocker:
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   First Caroline Crocker was censored. Except she wasn't.

   I happened to have lunch with Caroline a couple of months ago at a science conference. Yes, she suffered because of her views.
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   But your claim was that she was censored, not that she suffered. Since you failed to address the actual arguments from my Message 79 (or respond to the message at all) I shall make them again. Carolyn Crocker's contract was likely not renewed because she had demonstrated incompetency in the classroom. For example, in one of her lectures she stated, "No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory," as a criticism of evolution. In reality this is not only a misrepresentation (because evolution not only doesn't think this should happen but absolutely thinks it should not) but is also horribly confused and simpleminded. This view of what is wrong with evolution would never make it into a scientific journal or conference simply because it not only has no scientific support whatsoever but even worse shows the claimant to be at best horribly confused and at worst terribly ignorant.
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   Even worse, the statement about a dog turning into a cat is standard creationist claptrap with no standing whatsoever within science. It has no business in a science classroom.
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2. Richard Dawkins:
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   Then Dawkins was in denial. Except he wasn't.

   Not true. Did you watch the video clip?
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   Yes. And I provided the relevant excerpts from the video in Message 92, and people have been looking at the video and telling you it doesn't support your claims. At around the nine minute mark Venter says, "I'm not so sanguine here as some of my colleagues that there's only one lifeform on this planet."
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   Davies responds, "We've got the same genetic code, we've got a common ancestor."
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   To which Venter replies, "Well, you don't have the same genetic code. In fact, the Mycoplasmas use a different genetic code that would not work in your cells. So there are a lot of variations on the theme."
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   Davies responds, "But you're not saying it belongs to a different tree of life from me, are you?"
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   And Venter avoids a direct response to the question: "Well, the tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren't really holding up. There may be a bush of life."
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   So what did Venter mean, exactly? Is he arguing for a bush of life, about which there is little debate? Or is he arguing for more than one independent origin of life?
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   And so Dawkins attempts to ask Venter if he means that some life on the planet is unrelated to other life on the planet: "I'm intrigued at Craig saying that the tree of life is a fiction. I mean...the DNA code of all creatures that have ever been looked at is all but identical. And surely that means that they're all related."
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   The moderator then moves the discussion on, so we never get to hear what Venter actually meant. But to the extent that Venter's comments were congruent with Koonin's work regarding a bush of life, clearly Dawkins wasn't asking about that. It was relatedness that was his concern, not a tree versus a bush.
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   I googled about looking for any direct comments Dawkins might actually have made about Koonin or the bush of life. The closest thing I could find is this comment Dawkins made in 2003, quoted in several places but not cited in such a way that I could track down a reference:
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   Dawkins writes:

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   "For there is, after all, one true tree of life, the unique pattern of evolutionary branchings that actually happened. It exists. It is in principle knowable. We don't know it all yet. By 2050 we should -- or if we do not, we shall have been defeated only at the terminal twigs, by the sheer number of species."
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   There's no hint here whether he would find a bush of life equally acceptable as a tree of life, but it should be noted that bushes are just small trees. There's no pedagogical difference between them. The concept that a bush is meant to invoke is branches separating and coming back together and/or joining with other branches, something not very common in most trees and bushes. This is an example from the February, 2000, issue of Scientific American of what people actually have in mind when they say "bush of life":
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   I doubt very much that Dawkins has any problem at all with this.
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3. Eugenie Scott:
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   Then Eugenie Scott claimed science was "limited to direct observations of events occurring in nature or under controlled laboratory conditions." Except she didn't.

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   Again, this is not true. Eugenie was quoted correctly. I think if she had time to really think through her answer, it would have been different - but she was accurately quoted.
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   As you've now finally conceded, Eugenie Scott was not quoted correctly, and the paraphrase did not accurately capture what she actually said. The reason so many people realized that Eugenie would never have said that is because "direct observation" is a creationist catchphrase. Any paraphrase of an evolutionist's comments that includes creationist catchphrases cannot, by definition, be anywhere close to accurate.

So let's sum up:

1. Counter to your claim, Caroline Crocker wasn't censored, but you haven't conceded this yet..
2. Counter to your claim, Dawkins isn't in denial about Koonin's work so far as anyone can tell, but you haven't conceded this yet.
3. Counter to your claim, Eugenie Scott was not quoted accurately, but you still claim the paraphrase accurately captured her meaning, so you haven't conceded on this one yet, either.

Congratulations for consistency regarding false assertions.--Percy

I would propose a little side thought that I believe will aid to the main discussion here. Note how Scott and a good many others exclude any discussions in the scientific arena, and will usually turn them away at the door, regarding the possibility of the universe having a supernatural cause. They protest that because something supernatural can never be tested scientifically then therefore it has no place in science. This may come as a shock coming from a YEC, but I agree. The supernatural has no place in science discussions.However that being said I would point out that the term "supernatural" means beyond nature. Today most view the term to regard anything that is beyond what is physically possible. Many YEC's however inadvertently employ use of the term to discuss an entity that is at the highest possible end of what "is" possible...meaning God. But look at this in other areas for example to see what I am talking about. We would not normally refer to the fastest runner ever in the Olympics, as a "supernatural" runner. We would instead call him a "supreme" runner. Meaning that he was the fastest "possible" runner, not a runner with powers beyond what is possible.Likewise I suggest that in referring to God, rather than getting turned away at the door, we reference Him as the "supreme" being and not a "supernatural" being. That is to say that God is at the highest end of what is possible, and not some mythical entity that is beyond what is possible. This therefore does NOT exclude examination of the scientific evidence for the possibility of an intelligent designer, and or special creation. And it removes the punch-line to the good old "flying spaghetti monster" joke.

So are you saying here that you believe that a naturally created universe is possible based on the casimir experiments? If this is the case I was wondering how you get around the problem of needing the perimeters (such as the two metal plates in a vacuum) to be in place in order to have a quantum fluctuation? That's a real chicken and egg problem in itself. Secondly, how do you have a zero point of energy fluctuate into existence in a quantized universe where nothing can exist smaller than a Planck? There would be no time/space to have a vacuum, and thus no particle pair productions. Without which there would be no quantum fluctuations. And finally, how do you explain the "creation" of new particles in a universe governed by the law of conservation of energy? It seems to me that at the very most we are only seeing some yet unexplained conversion of energy in the casimir experiments. Not the creation of completely new particles.

History repeats itself. Designtheorists mouth (or pen) writes check... That his boom-boom is unlikely to cash...From Message 240That's right. The last time designtheorist promised evidence, he failed to deliver it after a year and half. Percy even expanded the thread limit to 400 in order to accomodate the evidence. But designtheorist provided doodly squat.Here he promises during the Christmas holidays to review a Feynman paper after the libraries reopened. This of course did not happen.From Message 244Of course Krauss' book came out a few days later designtheorists post was made. I imagine that whatever library designtheorist was referring to has opened after the 2011 holidays, closed again for the 2012 holidays, and then reopened again at the start of this year. Yet no follow up by designtheorist.

Did I say any such thing? Seriously JBR, you are completely out of your depth here. You didn't even address the two possibilities that designtheorist did include before writing your woof ticket.What I commented on is the rejection of creation of the universe by natural causes without a single argument of any kind. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

But even if fine-tuning is correct, this doesn't lend significant support to the idea of an intelligent Creator.The universe can be fine-tuned and have no creator at all (intelligent or otherwise).Therefore, including "intelligent Creator" in your alternative hypothesis about fine-tuning would be misleading and wrong.
Therefore, it's not scientific.

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.

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. Paul Davies quotes his conclusion approvingly. Listen to Sir Roger here.Sir Roger is an atheist, so I think it is fair to say his success is disproving a naturalistic Big Bang was rather surprising. So much so, in fact, that Roger wrote a book titled "Cycles of Time" in which he tries to revive the Cycle Theory with some new mathematics. Unfortunately, his mathematics (in this case) have some serious problems with physicality.Here's a quote from the blog "Not Even Wrong":
"I should make it clear that I’m not at all convinced by what Penrose is proposing. He needs the distant future of the universe to be conformally invariant, and this requires all particles to be massless. As far as we know the electron is completely stable, with unchanging mass, and this will always ruin conformal invariance. Penrose himself notes the problem. For this to be overcome, whatever our ultimate understanding is of how particles get mass must change so that these masses go to zero in the future. It’s also seems to me that the conformal anomaly of QCD will always be a problem, with quantization and the renormalization group always breaking conformal invariance and giving a mass scale, indefinitely far into the future."
Not Even WrongBy making particles massless, Roger is basically reversing the arrow of time. He is attempting to turn the universe back into a low entropy state. One certain way you can know your theory is in trouble is if it requires a reversal of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.I repeat it again. No naturalistic explanation for the cause of the Big Bang works. Also, no version of the Cycle Theory is viable. Something happened at the beginning of the universe that was beyond the realm and power of nature to perform.Some people will try to discount this evidence with lots of arm-waving and maybe some name-calling, but it has to be considered. Evidence for a low entropy Big Bang coupled with evidence of extreme fine-tuning, well, let's just say the evidence is beginning to mount.The question is: How do we think about these things scientifically? If science can detect the effects of dark matter and dark energy, why can it not detect the effects of the supernatural?

I find your post confusing. You seem to be saying the Penrose's efforts are wrong. Exactly what arguments that you make are advanced by Penrose being wrong?

It wasn't so very long ago that no naturalistic explanation of electricity worked. And then one did.There's a big difference between not having a satisfactory explanation yet and deciding that the explanation must be spooks.(And remember that no explanation of spooks has ever worked either.)

Again, that is simply another totally irrelevant, misleading and incorrect statement.Science can detect the effects of dark matter and dark energy because they behave just like regular matter and regular energy.It really is that simple.Science has never been able to find any evidence of the supernatural because no one, not one single individual, has ever come up with a way to test the supernatural.

The Ekpyrotic model "works": I guess we'll just have to take your word for it. Color me unconvinced.

quote:

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Roger Penrose has mathematically shown any naturalistic cause for the Big Bang to be beyond any realm of chance

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In fact Penrose simply argues that the low entropy state can't be a purely random arrangement. That doesn't do anything to rule out the possibility of a naturalistic cause.

Your link to the Roger Penrose video doesn't work. Please fix.I assume you're referring to this Penrose quote about the low entropy condition of the early universe: 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?There's a couple things I don't understand, one specific and one general.Specific to fine tuning, given that we don't know everything and never will, how can we know that the value of a universal constant isn't demanded by other natural laws of which we're not yet aware.And general to this thread, how come the five minor tests that you claimed would play a key role in actual discussion of the evidence (see Testing Theories of Origins) have seen no mention here?--Percy