NvC-1: What is the premise of Naturalism in Biology?

Thread copied here from the NvC-1: What is the premise of Naturalism in Biology? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Probably a bit over the top.

I don't know if you realized it, but you replied to Dr Adequate's Message 65 but quoted from RAZD's Message 11.

Hi Richard,I didn't realize this thread would be accumulating posts at such a rapid rate. Moderation should have stepped in sooner.From Message 67: Please don't set up traps. The Forum Guidelines encourage you to be clear and precise, presenting evidence and arguments and then through discussion clarifying and elaborating upon them.From Message 68: If there's a key distinction between evolution and neo-Darwinian evolution such that you accept one and reject the other then you should make it clear.From Message 69: I don't think anyone will see the distinction you're drawing between "evolution" and "evolution itself."Also, when appropriate it would improve the clarity of your posts to quote the specific portion of a message that you're responding to. There are a couple dBCodes available for this purpose: [quote] and [qs]. See dBCode Help for details.From Message 76There's a general consensus in this thread that your idiosyncratic ideas do not cohere into a consistent and rational whole. Some are trying to gain further insights into your thinking. Being evasive is just raising further suspicions that you're not being honest and forthright.If your ideas are evidenced and rational then they you should be able to state them clearly. Your inability to make these clear statements and your reluctance to respond to requests for clarification and more information is working against you.To conclude, I'm seeing multiple comments in this thread that tell me people are seeing you as unclear, obfuscatory, illogical and evasive, and that you're ignoring such feedback. No one can make you care what other people think, but when many people say the same thing it shouldn't be ignored, either. This is a moderated forum, so if moderation thinks they have a point then moderation will step in. I'm stepping in. Please step it up.

Keeping things simple is often a good idea, but not to the point of error. "Life consists only of matter" is as clearly in error as "pizza consists only of dough." How would you characterize the role of ATP if life were only matter?If I could touch on honesty just a bit, if I claimed I was an ordained minister I would be lying. My inability to display the qualities of such training would be apparent and people would question it. Would you like to come clean about anything?

I consider all topic proposals on the merits but informed by what I've observed thus far of the proposer's ability to engage in rational, informed and constructive discussion.

Here's a link to Richard's book at Amazon: Darwinian-Naturalism is Pseudoscience. It's free on Kindle. Click on the book cover and you can read a good part of it online.There's a lengthy "About the Author" section. Dr. Wang was born in Shanghai, China, in 1941. He was at Dalhousie University in Canada in the physics department for many years but doesn't feel he published any papers of consequence. He accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in 1993. Because he's a theoretical physicist he knows new information through random mutation is impossible.He is given to bold unsupported statements.

Hi Richard,There are no time requirements for replying. Take your time.With regard to opening a new thread, is it your view that this thread has reached a consensus about naturalism in biology? If so could you state that consensus?I'm gaining the strong impression that you do not want to engage with most of the feedback people are providing you. You've responded to only 16 of 60 replies to you, about 25%. I'm not inclined toward opening a new thread for you to repeat that performance.

To Richard: What he said.

If you continue ignoring moderator feedback and insisting on charting your own somewhat unintelligible course, nothing's getting promoted. I don't have hours of time to analyze your cryptic stuff trying to figure it out.Please stop referring to messages as, for example, Admin(151). You can link directly to messages with [msg=151], which becomes Message 151.

This is a suggestion, there's no need to follow it.I'd like to suggest that no progress will be made in discussions about information until a common and unambiguous definition is adopted, one where information can be quantified. I propose using the definition of information used by Information theory - Wikipedia.Here's Shannon's original paper introducing the field of information theory: A Mathematical Theory of Communication. He makes a key statement at one point:

quote:

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The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

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Shannon's focus is communication of information (he worked for Bell Labs, the nation's dominant telephone company at the time), so he goes on to define information in a rigorous and mathematical way.

Hi Richard,Could you please use the dBCodes. Your first line: Should instead be: Creating those links to messages is extremely easy. In your original message simply type this: If you'd like to see how any message was composed, just click on the "peek" button in the lower right of any message and you'll be shown the original text.

It would be nice to begin your message with, "In this message I'll be replying to both Dr Adequate's Message 65 and RAZD's Message 11. I'll address RAZD's Message 11 first."Then further down in your post it would be nice to say, "Now, shifting to Dr Adequate's Message 65..."These are just suggestions to make it less likely that someone will miss a reply from you. You're under no obligation to follow them.

Exactly. I quoted that portion. Science has so far been unable to quantify meaning. It feels to me that the way information is being discussed in this thread requires quantification, so unless the discussion shifts from meaning to Shannon information the discussion is bound to become like comparing different genera of fruit.