If it can be, how can the "Absence of Evidence" be "Evidence of Absence?".

But also how sure you are of 'not b'.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Peg, you disappoint me. I have ready many of your posts, because I thought you were an intelligent person and an honest debater. Now it turns out I was wrong. The sentence I quoted above struck me as something that didn't fit in your idiosyncratic style of writing. So I googled it, and guess what? You didn't write it. You cut and pasted it from somewhere else, possibly from here. If you scroll three pages down in this link, you'll see a post by someone called "Melie 3". At the end of this post a source is mentioned:

quote:

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Source(s):
"creation" published by Jehovahs Witness 1985

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At least Melie 3 is honest enough to admit she quoted another source. You should have done the same.As I checked out some of your earlier participations in this thread I came upon another case where you sounded not quite like yourself. In Message 57, you write: Googling this reveals at least three other sites where this can be found verbatim. For example, here (scroll down about five pages) you can read what a person called "Alex S" wrote. Again, it is made clear that it's a quote (Paul Davies is explicitly named).You are in direct violation of forum rule 7, Peg. Blatantly so.Why?Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Peg, you did the right thing. Good for you.Now that that's out of the way, let me take you to task on the following: This presumes that the laws of nature will change if left to themselves. Could you point out what reasons we have to presume this? Why would we call them "laws of nature" if they were so capricious?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

The decay you mention is better known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But it applies to physical stuff only. Laws of nature do not decay, that's a nonsensical notion. Life is not sustained by "the precision of all the elements", but by a continuous input of energy from the sun. Eventually the sun will have used up all it's nuclear fuel and will cease to be. When that happens, life on earth will no longer be sustained.In other words, the decay keeps going on, even the sun will "decay". But the whole process takes such a long time that, in the mean time, life can make an appearance on earth and flourish. It's not going to last forever though.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

The only meaningful way I can interpret what you ask is: "Why don't the laws of nature change, if left to themselves?" Well, if the only reason you have to suppose they would change is that everything else changes ("decays") too, then I would say you are making a category mistake. The laws of nature are not the sort of things that decay. We wouldn't call them "laws of nature" if they were. To repeat what I said before, you are presupposing that change is the natural state for everything, even for the laws of nature.^* I ask you: why can't constancy be the natural state? As far as the laws of nature are concerned, it's more parsimonious to simply suppose constancy, than to have to introduce an extra entity to keep change at bay. Not only do you have to explain the change itself, but also the existence of the extra entity. * It's a self-defeating proposition, by the way: if the Second Law of Thermodynamics - a law of nature - were susceptible to itself, then the only way it can go - to put it simply - is from "everything changes" to "not everything changes".To tie this in with the topic, what evidence do you have that it's not a team of Norse gods manning the interstellar gas station, instead of your particular deity?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

First of all, the way you want nature to operate has no bearing on how nature actually operates. It's fallacious reasoning to say that something must be the case because it would be unsatisfactory otherwise. Nature works the way it works, whether you like it or not.Next, if by "the very things that make life possible" you refer to the laws of nature, then I must repeat that you are making a category mistake. I have explained this before, so I won't go into it again but illustrate it by saying that your insistence on the fact that everything breaks down doesn't help you very much because, for a certain value of 'everything', I agree: everything breaks down. Better still, it always has and always will. Pretty constant behaviour, that. Do you now see what I mean by "category mistake"?And last but not least, you should also realise that one of the things that make life possible is the very fact that everything breaks down. Without this fortuitous circumstance, by now the earth would be too small a place for all the life that would continuously be spawned by previous life, but which would never die. We'd all probably be buried beneath a thick blanket of mainly bacteria. I asked for evidence. Your simply stating it doesn't cut it.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Let's try a thought experiment.Let's suppose that a certain finite set of parameters completely defines a universe. Let's further suppose that we can flip coins or throw dice to determine the values of these parameters, thereby defining an example of a possible universe.If we do this a number of times, we end up with a set of possible universes, some of which are suitable for life in some form or other, and which may or may not actually contain life, while others are utterly hostile to any form of life whatsoever, and are thus completely devoid of it.From the point of view of life form X in one of the universes that contains life it might seem that it is extremely fortunate that its universe is exactly right for it. However, we on the outside know that its universe is just one of many possible universes, the parameters of which were determined in a random procedure. And we are not surprised to find that the only universes where these thoughts are expressed are the universes where life is possible in the first place. Obviously, we are also not surprised that we hear nothing from universes where life is impossible.Of course, in reality we don't know how the parameters of our universe have been determined, but we are in the same position as life form X in the example above. This means that, from our experience of finding ourselves in our life-friendly universe, we cannot draw the conclusion that our universe is finely tuned for our existence, because we know a random set of parameters might equally well result in the same experience.Any comments?Edited by Parasomnium, : grammarEdited by Parasomnium, : another stupid language mistakeEdited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Great movie! Especially Germans must have gotten the message.The descriptions of ways to die on different planets was very humorous, and I also liked the comparisons with swimming pools, cranes and planes and so on. Very instructive.

I think part of the problem in this debate lies in two different meanings connected with the term 'fine-tuned'. The meaning of the verb 'to fine-tune' is something like "precisely adjusting something towards an optimum setting". On this interpretation, the idea of a goal is an implicit part of it. Moreover, those who use the argument of fine-tuning as evidence for an intelligent creator of the universe, can only do so consistently if they admit that their fine-tuning entity had a goal in mind, or else their argument is useless.Another possible interpretation of the word (not the verb) 'fine-tuned' is something like "having a very exact, particular value". If the term is used in this sense, the notion of a goal is much less strongly implied, if at all. On this interpretation, the fact that we find ourselves in a universe that's exactly right for us cannot be a surprise, because if the universe wasn't exactly right for us, we wouldn't be here to think about it.The use of these two different meanings as interchangeable interpretations might be the cause of some confusion.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Bluescat48, what exactly do you think my argument was in post 169? And what do you think my view is with regard to the fine-tuning argument?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Ah, OK. That wasn't quite clear to me from what you wrote. Excuse me for perhaps sounding a bit condescending, I didn't mean it that way.

But I thought I'd just implied that on the second interpretation there is no "why". It's one side of the coin, the other side of which is: if the universe were different, there wouldn't be a "why not".Actually, considering there is neither a "why", nor a "why not", there is in fact no coin, no dilemma.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Well, I don't know how "finely tuned" your cosmological constant actually is, but I know of a constant that easily beats it, because it has an infinite exactitude. Here are just the first 500 digits: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445
923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938
446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229
489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091
456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063
155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204
665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117
93105118548074462379962749567351885752724891227938183011949...And it goes on to infinity.This is of course the number pi. The funny thing about pi is that if you multiply it by the diameter of a circle, you get its circumference. Exactly. To any precision you'd like. Therefore, pi must be incredibly finely tuned, right? If the decimal expansion of pi was any different than it is, circles wouldn't be circles, right? Your puny cosmological constant can wait, first we desperately need an explanation for the digits of pi...Or do we?Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

And how do you know that the cosmological constant is different in that respect?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Please enlighten me, I am all ears.