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Author Topic:   Nature belongs to ID
Rahvin
Member (Idle past 166 days)
Posts: 4046
Joined: 07-01-2005


(3)
Message 12 of 146 (661547)
05-07-2012 6:16 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by Vanessa
05-07-2012 5:59 PM


It simply doesn't make sense
Your entire argument seems to boil down to just this one comment. Your find the idea that life naturally develops to be incredulous.
Yet your personal incredulity doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Your argument is called the Argument from Incredulity, and it's a logical fallacy. Whether an individual personally finds an argument to be personally convincing has nothing to do with the accuracy of that argument; you can find it "ridiculous" that adding two and two gives four, but it's still so.
Nature does not develop life by arbitrary events but through systems and processes, whether it is seed to sapling to mighty oak, caterpillar to pupal to butterfly, egg to chick to eagle.
Who told you that anyone thinks that nature develops life through arbitrary events?
The fact that chemistry is not at all random or arbitrary does not mean that it is intelligently guided. Mutation and natural selection are also not arbitrary...and do not require the interference or guidance of an intelligent agent.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by Vanessa, posted 05-07-2012 5:59 PM Vanessa has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 17 by Vanessa, posted 05-07-2012 6:48 PM Rahvin has replied
 Message 24 by Percy, posted 05-08-2012 7:22 AM Rahvin has replied

  
Rahvin
Member (Idle past 166 days)
Posts: 4046
Joined: 07-01-2005


Message 15 of 146 (661550)
05-07-2012 6:30 PM
Reply to: Message 13 by Vanessa
05-07-2012 6:18 PM


Re: Evidence for ID?
I don't know whether you are being serious when you say you don't believe there is any evidence supporting ID. Do you mean you are not persuaded by the evidence you've researched or simply that you've never looked? I believe you're being facetious, forgive me if I am wrong.
"Evidence" is defined as a fact or observation that directly adjusts the probability that a given hypothesis is accurate relative to competing hypotheses.
In the case of ID, the evidence given to support that hypothesis usually falls into just a few categories:
1) Facts or observations which do fit the predictions of ID, but which also fit just as well with the predictions of purely naturalistic evolution as well, and therefore is not really evidence in favor of ID over naturalism. In nearly all cases, these arguments also violate the principle of parsimony, and differenciate themselves from their naturalistic counterparts by simply adding "...and God did it" to the end without providing evidence necessitating the inclusion of the additional term.
2) Falsehoods - we see plenty of claimed evidence that simply isn't true; claims of observations or facts that are false due to the incompetence of the claimant, and occasionally attempts at outright deception.
3) Incredulity masquerading as evidence. This is usually an argument rather than actual evidence, and typically boils down to some combination of an emotional sense of wonder and curiosity at one's own ignorance of the natural world (Lord Kelvin once said that the mechanisms that drive a plant to grow from a seed or which allow the mind to cause a muscle to move are "infinitely beyond" human understanding), and a sense that alternatives "just don't sound right."
I've participated in many debates concerning Intelligent Design, and I have not once seen an accurate depiction of facts or observations that actually supported the hypothesis of Intelligent Design beyond competing hypotheses. In other words, I've never seen any real evidence that would suggest Intelligent Design is in fact an accurate model of reality.
Do you perhaps have some facts or observations you can share that would make Intelligent Design more likely to accurately represent reality than competing hypotheses, specifically the hypothesis that life processes including evolution are purely natural and do not require the interference of external intelligent actors?

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 13 by Vanessa, posted 05-07-2012 6:18 PM Vanessa has not replied

  
Rahvin
Member (Idle past 166 days)
Posts: 4046
Joined: 07-01-2005


(2)
Message 20 of 146 (661555)
05-07-2012 7:02 PM
Reply to: Message 17 by Vanessa
05-07-2012 6:48 PM


My first argument is against the title of 'Naturalism' to explain a process that has little of anything to do with Nature. Nature does not develop life through accident - an egg is fertilised by a sperm and implants itself in the wall of the uterus where a complex process kicks in to develop the baby. The system is in place before the egg is fertilised. The baby is the result of the system - without a system there is no baby.
No argument here. I've certainly never claimed that life is anything more or less than an extremely complex series of interdependent self-sustaining chemical and physical reactions.
Are you claiming, then, that the simple existence of ordered systems, like the laws of physics, is evidence supporting an Intelligent Designer?
Both sides are satisfied - I truly believe (and I hope to show) that the evolution of life will be as credulous as the birth of a baby. And does not require commitment to any religion.
I don;t quite understand what you're saying here. How can "the evolution of life be as credulous as the birth of a baby?" Credulity is irrelevant. The demonstrable accuracy of a given hypothesis in comparison to alternative hypotheses is all that matters.
PS: You say mutation is not arbitrary, but that is the very definition of 'mutation' - accidents in DNA.
Yet mutations obey the very constrained and predictable laws of chemistry, and so are not entirely random. To describe mutations as purely arbitrary events is to describe them inaccurately.
Put another way - rolling dice may be somewhat random, but the result will always predictably be an integer between one and six. And the laws of probability are themselves consistent, as well.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 17 by Vanessa, posted 05-07-2012 6:48 PM Vanessa has not replied

  
Rahvin
Member (Idle past 166 days)
Posts: 4046
Joined: 07-01-2005


(2)
Message 33 of 146 (661595)
05-08-2012 12:14 PM
Reply to: Message 24 by Percy
05-08-2012 7:22 AM


Mutation is pretty arbitrary the vast majority of the time.
You and I both know what Creationists and cdesign proponentists mean whenever they use words like "random" or "arbitrary" or "accident" in reference to mutation. They've usually been told that mutations are like a tornado in a junkyard, utterly random, and that without some intelligent guiding force such a tornado could never assemble a complex, functioning machine.
But mutations, while having a significant random element, are not purely arbitrary, and to describe them as such without qualifying the limits of that element is to describe mutation inaccurately.
Mutations are guided, simply not by an intelligent external actor. Mutations are dependent on the laws of chemistry - genes don't just randomly self-assemble in totally random patterns from a random soup of base elements (even a totally random soup of base elements would still react in predictable ways; Argon isn't going to just arbitrarily form a covalent bond with Carbon). They're copying errors, and the results are still assembled from the same already-complex components as the rest of the genetic material. Mutations are also dependent on the surrounding genetic code, which is inherited, not random. And finally, of course, mutations are guided by natural selection - their initial appearance is somewhat arbitrary, but their continued prevalence in a population is contingent on environment and circumstance.
Individual mutations are random in their initial appearance because we cannot predict from the parent organism specifically what mutations will exist, but those mutations are not so random that we cannot predict with great accuracy the limited types of mutations that can occur, because they are all copying errors. It's like rolling dice - we may not be able to predict the specific result, but we always know that each die will come up as an integer between one and six, that we'll never see a decimal, and we'll never see a ten, and the die will never turn into a chicken. It's random...but not in the same sense as a tornado in a junkyard.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
- Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of
variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the
outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." Barash, David 1995.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 24 by Percy, posted 05-08-2012 7:22 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 37 by NoNukes, posted 05-09-2012 4:44 AM Rahvin has not replied
 Message 39 by Percy, posted 05-09-2012 7:34 AM Rahvin has not replied
 Message 41 by Dr Adequate, posted 05-09-2012 7:41 AM Rahvin has not replied

  
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