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Member (Idle past 3863 days) Posts: 390 From: Irvine, CA, United States Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Can science say anything about a Creator God? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NoNukes Inactive Member |
For example, to get back to trivial statistics, inorder to know whether the 3 sixes that have just turned up on the 3 dice is an occasion for excitement we need to know how many times the dice have been thrown. That's got to be wrong. The result of the throw that just turned up is unrelated to anything that happened in the past. But if just turned up means throwing until you get something you like and then quitting, you are describing something different.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
How rare is life? I don't know, and I don't think anyone else does, either. But assuming that the appearance of life is a natural process, and that the same physics apply universally, I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe it hasn't happened elsewhere: if only one planet per galaxy gives rise to life, how many planets is that? Could 100-200 billion planets with life constitute rarity? I'm convinced that life exists elsewhere other than on earth and other than in this solar system. But that idea is completely unrelated to the idea of life existing in a universe where suns or even nuclear fusion is impossible. And whether or not you agree that those potential universes (and others) are more common than universes in which life can exist, those relative probabilities are the parameters of the this particular discussion between blue and I. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
And that is why the Derran Brown film is instructive - his ten heads in a single take feels like magic because we know that the odds of him achieving it on the first throw are tiny. Yes. But your statement of why was wrong. The probability of him achieving ten heads on any given throw is exactly the same. I don't care how many times he did it and failed, there is no higher probability probability that the next time will be successful. However the probability of achieving the feat at least once in thousands of throws is significant. I'm not sure how your point relates to an error in my argument.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
No I'm not. I do not consider this universe to be special or a blue marble. I do not consider all the other potential universes to be identical. Well then chose infinite colors other than blue for all of those other universes. And blue for the set of all (not just this universe) life bearing universes. That would still not change the proportion of blue to non-blue marbles. We can group the universes in any way we choose, and evaluate probabilities based on those groupings. I elect to group them as life supporting vs non-life supporting universes for the purpose of this discussion, and have postulated that parameters leading to life supporting universes are extremely rare. You don't reject my postulate. That acceptance (for the point of argument) is reasonable because it is the basis for the discussion. You are instead telling me that such a grouping makes no sense, but you are not telling me why other than that you don't like it, or that I am making life special. But for this discussion, life is not special, it is merely the point of the discussion. Life is only as special in the sense that a three on a million sided die is special.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Well of course I understand that and totally agree Except that you said something completely different.
You can't say that something happens only rarely then demand an explanation other than chance if the long odd chance comes up. I think I can if the odds against are sufficiently long,
The Darren Brown trick is the creationist position - all they see is the first toss of the coins and all 10 coming up heads and think that it must be a miracle. Yes, and that illusion/trick is totally non-analogous to a situation where there is truly only a single attempt. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
What you and the creationists are doing is looking at that one hand, deciding it's special, and therefore claiming that its improbability (1 in 144,555,105,949,057,024) requires a special explanation. No I'm not. I am not considering this universe as special. I'm grouping all of the universes together which produce life and comparing that to the population of all universes. I don't particularly care about the particular example we have. You are attempting to distinguish the problem from the one of the rare blue marble. But there is no distinction.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
inorder to know whether the 3 sixes that have just turned up on the 3 dice is an occasion for excitement we need to know how many times the dice have been thrown. What this would have to mean to be correct is "whether the 3 sixes that just turned up on the dice 'on film' is an occasion for excitement" because without that modification or understanding, your statement is wrong.
Correct. My suggestion is that there's no reason to believe that there was only one roll of the dice/toss of the coins. True. But that means your remark is completely unrelated to the discussion I was having with bluejeans. I agree that having multiple universes or any other kind of multi-roll scenario makes my point moot. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
If we accept that chance is simply chance and the improbable outcome happens, we are surpised - because it was highly unlikely - but are we entitled to go looking for supernatural explanations? No, we are never entitled or even urged to look for supernatural explanations if we are to be scientists. Because despite what designtheorist says to the contrary, he is ultimately asking us when we will give up empirical based science and just say God. Well, when do you stop looking for your keys and start considering the possibility of poltergeist key eaters? Isn't the answer clearly never? And perhaps that is the answer to the question posed by this thread. But we can still consider whether there might be natural explanations other than @#$5 happens. That too is part of science. In fact, we don't really know enough right now to say whether a universe with life is both surprising and inexplicable using solely natural processes and explanations. Fine tuning might ultimately be a prediction of naturalism. We can either end the discussion at that point or we can offer potential explanations. After all, we cannot answer questions like: Why should we view the 'fundamental' constants as being settable to any value we choose? How many of them are 'fundamental' and 'independent' if they are settable? Without being able to answer those questions, how can we even accept the idea that every combination of constants is equally probable and thus rare or plentiful compared to other combinations. ABE: At any rate, we seem to have closed the gap between our positions considerably. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
That fits the scenario. We're talking about masses of different potential universes, like lots of different potential lottery winners. And you think that change affects the probability of getting blue vs. that of getting non-blue marbles in some way? And you are still phrasing the problem improperly. The question is not one of blue vs teal. It's the blue marble vs. every other colored marble. The probability that we'll get non-blue is a microscopic bit short of being one, while the probability of getting blue would be the microscopic bit. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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No. It means that the probability of any colour is remote, and whatever the resulting colour is, nothing requires explaining except to those who have decided, after the event, that the particular resulting colour was the target. Blue is not a target in a chance universe scenario, and our hypothetical scenario is one of chance. I've spent a lot of time with this off-line today, and I've been able to convince myself that you are right. Random, unusual stuff happens all of the time, and there need not be any explanation for a particular rare event. I find the rareness to indicate that there probably is an explanation for that the parameters of the universe have certain values, but I do not reach the conclusion that the reason is design. But that feeling is entirely subjective. I have no basis for saying what level of improbability requires that there be an explanation. Here is one take on the idea: Debunking Christianity: Problems with the Fine-Tuning Argument
quote: I commend your patience. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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"In most physics textbooks you will read that gravity is the weakest of all forces, many orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetism... We see this is wrong. Recall that the gravitational force is fictional, like the centrifugal force." P. 151 Do you have something new to say? We already know, and you've all but admitted that Stenger's labeling of gravitational force as fictional is entirely correct. In fact, your post contains no direct attack on Stenger's proposal. Instead it contains an attempt to denigrate his argument by pointing to statements about gravity that are easily defendable. Fail.
current models strongly suggest ours in not the only universe" In fact, Stenger's book makes the attempt to rebut the fine tuning argument without resorting to the multiple universe concept, so even assuming that multiple universes is not defensible, your criticism is off-base. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
deciding he has been on the wrong track, and, most important, saying so I had some other choice? Lol!!Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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There are scientific papers written on these topics. Typically, the degree of fine-tuning is expressed as a percentage of the range of values possible for each parameter. I accept that you do not have this information readily available to you, but I would think it would be possible for you to consider the issue based on percentages and the number of parameters - which is exactly what I proposed you do. Does your proposal model reality? Can you present an argument that it does? It is true that papers are written in this way. But there is no basis for assuming that the parameters are variable over that range or that every value is equally probable, or that any combination of parameters is independent. In fact, we don't know if they are variable at all. Yes it is possible to assume that every value of a parameter that we've never seen change at all is equally probable and that there is a rheostat that we can use to adjust it with, but our consideration would be pure speculation as would any conclusion so reached. What you are asking us to do is ignore some of the most basic criticisms of fine tuning, without giving us any rationale other than to follow you down a rabbit hole that may not model reality. And to what end? You haven't presented an argument that fine tuning implies design anyway. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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Not at all. I'm asking you to follow the reasoning of the physicists, many of them atheists, who have written about these parameters. It is important to understand the data and the logic in the papers. I've read a few papers, and I don't find that they address the questions I've asked. Do you disagree? I note here that you neither cite any papers nor offer any discussion, nor make any attempts to answer any of my questions. My working hypothesis is that the reason you never deliver or answer questions is that you are a fraud and actually have no answer. To get the ball rolling, I'll cite one such article. http://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.3697v1.pdf Stars In Other Universes: Stellar structure with different fundamental constants. Fred C. Adams In this paper the Adams looks at a few parameters that he postulates determine whether stars can exist with different parameters. The constants chosen are the gravitational constant, the fine structureconstant, and a composite parameter that determines nuclear fusion rates. While the author concludes that stars can be produced in about 1/4 of the parameter space, the author makes no attempt to argue that the parameters can actually be varied. So this paper does not answer my question. Perhaps you do know of some better papers to look at, but without answering my questions, these kinds of papers don't prove or disprove diddly squat.
Your argument seems to be that you don't want to know the evidence because once you know the evidence you are in a rabbit hole of Wonderland and you cannot get out. This is just another way of saying "Don't confuse me with facts." If you ever got around to actually providing any evidence, then you'd have some basis to say this. But in fact you have not argued or even denied that my questions are relevant; you've merely avoided them, as per usual. And right on cue, you attempt to shift your burden of persuasion to me. Why is it that when put up time comes around, designtheorist is always found waiting for that library to re-open after the Christmas holidays, even when the calendar tells us it's baseball season? Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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NoNukes writes: Do you have something new to say? We already know, and you've all but admitted that Stenger's labeling of gravitational force as fictional is entirely correct. designtheorist writes: No. See message 300 above. I've read your denial that general relativity is correct which was posted after I questioned you. What's pretty clear is that you are well aware that Stenger's statements are correct based on general relativity, and that you'd like us to dismiss that truth in order to make Stenger appear to be an idiot. I'll also note that your new defense of your position is entirely different from your original statements which attempted to distinguish between attractive force and field. In other words, you are once again shown to be a fraud.
designtheorist writes: On a cosmological level, General Relativity is more precise than Newtonian physics. On a cosmological level, the concept of attraction is not used. But on the surface of the planet, the concept of attraction is very helpful. On a cosmological level, gravity's attractive force is not just "not used" it is described as fictitious, and of course that is exactly the application we are discussing. Your comments would apply equally well to the centrifugal force. It is used in calculations, but we know that it is fictitious. Let's identify some more nonsense:
This just shows Stenger is writing as an atheist and not as a scientist. A scientist will take a position and stick with it. Stenger was not able to do that. No, designtheorist. That's not what a scientist does. Given that he doesn't know and has no evidence one way or another, he idoes not attempt to with denying a multi-verse. Forcing crap into a fixed idea is what you do, and not what scientists do. Stenger's book is designed to address a specific criticism of fine tuning. That he does not address others is not a weakness. But I can see that neither reason nor requests for answers will sway you, so I'll be posting a summary and leaving you twisting in the wind. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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