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Exploring Origins

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ant

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Re: Exploring Origins

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Nature does not have purpose. Intelligent agents design a purpose for things.
you are side stepping what I've asked.

setting that aside..

you are a product of nature, an "agent"
"intelligent agents" design purpose
by sheer definition, Nature has purpose

So you are saying purposelessness can achieve purpose, right?


But there is enough evidence for you to determine that a natural agent really doesn't have purpose, right?


Everything else aside, I think you're way out of you league of understanding here, Johnson. Your illusory purpose could never really be relied on to make such a definitive statement like "Nature has no purpose"
Who do you think you're fooling here?
You can lie to me, but please don't lie to yourself. It's not healthy
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Re: Exploring Origins

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This pattern of missing rainbow colors corresponds to the absorption patterns in the elements of the sun
Are you comparing the purposeful complexity of consciousness, which happens to be a product of Nature, to the orderly colors of a rainbow, and then expect that to stand in for an explanation of what I've specifically asked above???
Last edited by ant on Tue Oct 08, 2013 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Exploring Origins

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What is interesting about the Enigma code is that it took a lot of the most intelligent people of the time a long time to crack and decipher.The human genome project is an exercise in human intelligence decoding that code.The need for intelligence to do this speaks for itself.
The Enigma code began in the mind of a German.They made machines and wrote manuals for their own side.The message was typed by someone,then scrambled then sent.
The fact that the code materially exists in D.N.A doesn't explain a great deal. I think a code is essentially a concept first.A mechanistic view of how it works seems to miss this.
Beyond this and probably annoyingly,when we talk about about origins we do have to ask where the raw materials and physical laws came from, if indeed they had some part to play in the origin of life. Hello Johnson.I just saw your post now.Evidently your scientific knowledge is impressive.You explain things by functions,properties laws.You seem to think abiogenesis can occur naturally. What I don't think you can explain, is why the physical laws exist or how they originated. What is your theory on the origin of the universe?
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Re: Exploring Origins

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Ant:
Could a law of nature explain how life began? And if so, how is it conceivable that such a law could compel an enormous collection of atoms to follow a precise order?
Not A law, but the laws, sure. Just like gravity doesn’t explain wind by itself. It needs the other laws to form the whole picture.
Ant
If they are not random then they are information based; instructed complexity. Hence, for true explanatory power we must account for BIOLOGICAL information.
I don’t feel like you are using the word information the same way I would. It seems to me you are substituting out a word like “plan” or “design” with the word information, which is not a synonym for those.
ant
How would the laws of physics be adverse to a law that governs structured information based order?
This sentence is a train wreck in my language processing. Can you clarify what you mean by “structured information based order”? What are some examples of “structured information based order”, and what would not qualify?

The atheist will always deny God's existence when there is no scientific, natural explanation. Their response is ad nauseam:

"But saying God did it is wrong. God didn't do it because the deep intelligibility in nature is illusory!"
First, there is always a natural way for something that has actually happened in the world to happen. That’s what it means for things to happen in our universe… It means they are possible!

I am happy to admit my ignorance to the causes of things. But the fact of my ignorance of a cause or method is not evidence that none such are possible!

Ant:
And of course, one of the blindest of blind spots for the atheist is their own argument from ignorance:

There is no evidence for P: therefore not P. = TOTAL Argument from Ignorance.
“Heat is caused by tiny elven cook fires on the surface of hot materials.”

You mean like little man-shaped dudes with fires? Like camp fires?

“Yes. They look like people.”

We have microscopes. There aren’t any tiny elves.

“They are invisible.”

How would you know they look like people, if they are invisible?

We have spectroscopic data that says nothing is on fire there. There is no fuel source. No oxidizing gas. No emissions. It’s just hot iron.

“The fires aren’t made of wood! And anyway, “fire” is a code word.”

So… what should we be looking for to find the elves and their fires? I mean “fires”?

“They can’t be found! They come before causality. They exist outside of space and time.”

So there’s no way for us to detect their presence, even in theory?

“That’s right!”

Well, from what we can tell these iron particles are repelling each other with electromagnetic radiation absorbed and emitted by their electrons which causes them to vibrate as they shove against each other and emit energy into the air through the laws of electromagnetism, and that is what we experience as “heat”. Which doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with what you were talking about.

“Right. That’s exactly what I said at the start. The elves are causing the electro- ah… what you said. Aren’t the elves wonderful?”
And then we have THIS tired old atheist argument:

We can't explain something with something else that is ultimately more complex. God would demand an explanation himself!
Why not trot out your tired old un-assailable rebuttal to that tired old argument? Don’t you mean to say that this argument makes you feel tired and old, as you’ve heard it so many times and yet never had anything to say that could stand against it?

So, we’re trying to explain how things happen, right? The whole effort is trying to explain how complexity got here. So we add in a more complex thing to explain the first complex thing. Did that explain the first thing? At all? Didn’t it just complicate the picture?

http://www.booktalk.org/a-mystery-to-so ... t8827.html
Johnson:
Now you introduce god to explain the bits we don't know. Well, who is god? What is god? where did god come from? why is god so powerful? What does god do? Can we see god? can we actually really know anything about god? What is there to say about the special place that god lives, or the magic invisible places he created to punish and reward people?

You see what happens? We replace a small mystery, one that may well be solved over time, about the nature of gravity with a huge matrix of completely un-answerable questions about a fictional character.

There are mysteries to gravity, but at least we know it's real. We know what it does, we know where to find it, we know how to use it, we can make endless predictions using what we know about gravity.
This does not explain the original problem, and gives us another problem which has been designed from the outset to be so unanswerable that it is a waste of effort to try. Does that sound like a solution?

If so, there’s another word I would want to hear you define.

But what does explain things? Realizing that the complex thing is just a consequence of less complex things interacting with each other in less complex ways.


Lets say we’re trying to explain how one billiards ball smacks into another. That’s an event we can witness. We can talk about everything involved, it’s all sitting right there to look at. One ball is struck by a stick, the force of the impact changes the inertia of the ball so that it travels across the table and strikes another ball. The first ball loses momentum, which is transferred into the second ball, which changes THAT ball’s inertia, and sends it rolling relative to the table.


Apply this concept to breaking the rack and you’ve got a simple explanation, invoking no more than what is readily available right in front of your eyes, to explain a complicated motion of billiards balls whizzing all over the table.


We didn’t have to invoke any unsolvable mysterious supernatural personalities to get to the bottom of it.

That of course is arrogant presumption on the part of the atheist (also very common trait).
Why does nature need to submit to demands of simplicity? Why does nature NEED to be simple rather than complex?
We are arrogant for not asserting to know for a fact that there is an invisible supernatural djinn responsible for all the things we can’t explain? Because if we can’t explain the origin of something then it COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED NATURALLY and requires an entity of infinite complexity, not of this world, to have put it in motion?


I don’t suppose nature does need to submit to any demands. But we can look at it and clearly see that complex things are made of less complex things. That’s pretty much the definition of those words… And if you look hard you will see that that remains true all the way down to sub-atomic levels. Nature doesn’t have to submit to our demands. Nature will do whatever it is going to do. But I will not submit to your claims of supernatural spell work when all evidence suggests it is entirely unnecessary, and imaginary.

ant:
What can not be denied is the more we peel away at Nature, the more complex it becomes.
This is exactly the opposite of what everyone who has ever looked into it has discovered.

We thought the earth was the center of the universe and to explain the retrograde motion of the planets we invented this convoluted system of invisible crystal spheres which traveled around us in strange contorted paths. Then galileo SIMPLIFIED it by observing that the sun was really in the center of our system. Then Newton simplified it by working out that it was really a matter of a simple rule which governed how objects moved relative to each other in space. Gravity is an attractive force inversely proportional to the square of the distance and always attracting toward the center of mass. One rule to predict them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Then Einstein came along… and made it even simpler! It was thought through Galileo and Newton that slightly different rules would have to hold for those things in motion relative to the ether vs a true and fixed reference frame. But it turns out that there is no way to determine the absolute speed of any uniform travel through space, so in fact, what relativity means is that the laws of physics are the same for every traveling reference point, and that there are not many laws for different motions, but the same laws for all!

Putting all these arrogant demands and presumptions by the atheist aside, Flann, we need to keep putting to task the explanatory ambitions of Science.

I think you should start capitalizing that, Ant. A proper title for your villain. The Atheist. Maybe change the font to something more sinister while you are at it.

Science overshoots itself all the time. Nevertheless, it is the worldview of atheists that claims Science has disproved the existence of a divine intelligence behind Nature.
Take your time on this one. Name one instance of a positively verified instance of a bonafide miracle. Name one instance where assuming a magical cause actually explained anything. Then tell me about over reach.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Exploring Origins

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The laws of complexity that lead to consciousness seem to be local laws. In the vastness of space we seem to be in a highly peculiar spot that allows conscious life to exist, however finite.
This is special pleading. The laws of physics give every appearance of being universal in all the observed universe. We are not the center of the universe. We are not on the only planet in our solar system. We are not made of special stuff. We are not the only things with feelings. We are not the only ones who can think. We are not the only ones who have self knowledge. We do not live in a privileged reference frame.

ant:
If "dumb nature" rolls the dice enough we are bound to get lucky here and there.
But it's all illusory.
Oh, this nonsense again.

The real whooper here is that as a product of nature, our naturalistic explanations may themselves be illusions.
But of course atheists are not fooled by these evolutionary forces. They have logic and reason on their side.
They don't believe in demons and fairies. Evolution has ceased to blindfold them. It's no longer illusory to them.
The unfortunates that suffer from belief (aka "cancer of the mind") are illogical fairy tale lovers that do not live their lives by evidence only.
Time for self reflection, Ant.

There is a tremendous difference between specified organization of living systems and the organized complexity of a spiral galaxy, or a rainbow.
Is that statement false?
If so, what is the evidence that proves it to be false?
Spiral galaxies form almost exclusively from gravitational effects. Rainbows are reflected light from thousands of water droplets. Both cases are talking about a limited number of variables and not really a good comparison to living systems.

How do the laws that govern genetic code organization ultimately achieving conscious systems surpass those that govern nonliving systems?
I’ve explained before that there are no special laws that distinguish between living and non-living things. Stones are chemical structures, so are people. Living things are chemical reactions. Self-perpetuating chemical reactions that seek out additional resources to continue reacting. There doesn’t need to be a whole new set of laws to govern living things, or thinking things.
Could science even define such a law AS a LAW?
Would any law governing the specified organization of cells be a Law for other "living" systems throughout the cosmos?
This law you keep asserting must exist, yet no-body has agreed to?
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Re: Exploring Origins

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johnson1010 wrote:Those are all examples of complex codes which we know for certain none of the intelligent agents we can confirm exist could have manufactured. You are assuming the existence of a god, and assuming that his having created these codes is a foregone conclusion. It is not.
So how do you explain the D.N.A. code ?
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Re: Exploring Origins

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We are constantly told that all the appearance of design and purpose is illusory
That is an opinion based on ignorance and simply a rebuttal to theist's inference to an intelligence behind Creation itself.
That's not an opinion based on ignorance. The idea that purpose is illusory is extremely complex. If you don't follow it; if you don't understand it, then I can see how you'd say it's based on ignorance. But not the ignorance of those who attempt to explain the mechanism.

I once ran across something strange in the woods where I grew up. It was a series of sticks, arranged in a roman numeral 2. My first(and instant) thought was that someone else placed the sticks. This initial conclusion is a well-documented bias in human psychology. We are biased to conclude that intelligence is the cause of anything and everything which appears to have purpose or contain information, even if those things are random and naturalistic. The examples are legion. Apophenia and Paradoelia are consequences of this bias.

The reason we are biased is because if we weren't, we'd be easier to ambush, easier to deceive, easier to enslave, easier to kill. By concluding that there was intelligence behind the roman numeral two, I was guilty of a false positive(after picking up the sticks, I saw that it was a single branch laying in a way that created an optical illusion). This is where the math kicks in, game theory if you will. A false positive is relatively harmless(increased wariness). We react in a way that's 'better safe than sorry'. A thousand false positives are less dangerous than a single false negative.

This results in an inherent bias in our psychology. Daniel Dennet calls it Agency Detection, and there are many books that show this bias is in fact a bias; we routinely reach false positive conclusions of Agency even when the truth is naturalistic(controlled experiments show this).

The idea that purpose is illusory comes directly from this bias.
ant wrote:How do the laws that govern genetic code organization ultimately achieving conscious systems surpass those that govern nonliving systems?
Which of the several aBiogenesis hypothesis addresses this?
Ant, none of the abiogenesis hypotheses address it. The origin of consciousness is a separate problem. Consciousness arose long after life arose. Hypotheses for the origin of consciousness include models of cultural evolution. Again, I'm more than happy to look through existing literature and discuss it here on Booktalk if you wish. There are models of how consciousness arose.
Flann wrote:The greater the complexity of the code the more likely it came from an intelligent source rather than some confluence of random events and laws.
Most information today is the result of human creation. The elephant in the room is whether or not natural laws can also create information. ID proponents say there is no evidence for spontaneous generation of information. Therefore evolution is false.

The problem is, this rebuttal is circular. A primary argument of ID is that we don't have evidence that information can arise spontaneously, therefore evolution is false. Yet, evolution is, at it's core, a naturalistic explanation for how information is created naturalistically. In order for the ID argument to be valid, you need to believe evolution is false. But the primary argument that evolution is false is that information can't arise spontaneously. This is circular.

The evidence for evolution is stronger than theists want to admit. It truly is. Not only in sheer volume, but in the elegance of the mechanism. Can information arise naturalistically? That's a question that's answered by evolution. Yes, information can and has arisen naturalistically, which we conclude from all available evidence.

Let's shelve the talk of abiogenesis for now. Not ignore it, but shelve it. I think there's another thread on abiogenesis where we can hash it out. Instead, I'll try to give my understanding of evolution and how it leads to the accumulation of information. Since the literature on evolution is so vast, I may misunderstand part of it or portray it incorrectly. So I'll try to keep it simple.

Let's assume that proto-life was naturalistically assembled from the stew of prebiotic ingredients on ancient Earth(we can discuss the "how" in another thread). The first form would have very little "information". It would be an 8-bit form of protolife.

By definition, the conditions of this protolife is that it can replicate, and during the replication process, it's information is changed/subtracted/added in a random fashion. One of the ways the original 8-bit life form may alter during replication is to form a 12-bit life form. (It may also lose information or alter information... mutations are random). Compared to the zettabytes of information in our genetic code, this 4-bit increase would be small. There's no telling what this increase in information may result in.

The consequences are as random as the mutation itself.

This is where the elegance of natural selection kicks in. While the mutations may be random, the environment is not. There are highly specific and numerous parameters in any environment. If the 4-bit increase lead to a type of organism that self-destructs or can't use the surrounding prebiotic molecules or can't replicate any further, then it is a dead end. That information is lost. The majority of mutations during ancient Earth would have originally resulted in dead ends.

But this replication isn't serial, it's parallel. Many proto-life forms, each with many 'offspring'. Think of the possible consequences of this 4-bit increase in information. If only 1 out of 100 of the 'offspring' is able to replicate slightly faster, or use resources a touch more efficiently, or resist destructive molecules a bit more effectively, then that single offspring will spawn countless others with the same traits. A new baseline is create(a new species of proto-life), and from that baseline an entirely new set of possible mutations now exists between parent and offspring.

That incremental increase in information from a mutation is enough to give rise to the zettabytes of information we see today. It happened over billions of years, a slow accumulation of random information that is de-randomized by the parameters of the environment. That is how information spontaneously generates.



A primary argument for an intelligent designer is that information can't come into existence in a naturalistic fashion. Yet that's exactly what all the evidence for evolution says happened. In order to accept any argument against the spontaneous generation of information, you first need to believe evolution didn't happen. Yet most ID proponents don't believe in evolution because they don't believe information can spontaneously generate. Again, it is circular.

EDIT - I said we could hash out abiogenesis on another thread, but this is an abiogenesis thread!!! Subsequent posts in this thread then. For the sake of brevity, this one is to show how evolution produces information.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: Exploring Origins

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Since Johnson's scientific knowledge greatly outweighs mine.I'm going to present some countervailing arguments vicariously, through an essay of David Berlinski from some time ago,1996.They have probably evolved since.At least it may provide some food for thought or maybe indigestion. Title;The deniable Darwin. http://www.rae.org/pdf/dendar.pdf
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Re: Exploring Origins

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to qualify as a living system (not rainbows, or snowflakes, or the rings around planets) there must be meaningful information . Meaningful to the system that receives it. "context". contextual meaning. the information must be specified.

How does meaningful specification arise spontaneously in nature?
That is the question.

I dont want pictures of rainbows and the pretty rings around Uranus. Stop making false comparisons.

Let me save you some key strokes: there is no scientific model that either explains or predicts how LIFE occurs in nature.
And there certainly is NOT any hypothesis that I know of that can be tested.
And saying it came from the ocean doesnt explain the question away either.

Come on now. Lets stop pretending.


If we cant say He did it, you cant say He didn't because there is no evidence. Thats an argument from ignorance, Johnson.
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Re: Exploring Origins

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ant wrote:...the worldview of atheists that claims Science has disproved the existence of a divine intelligence behind Nature. Science itself is not in the business of hypothesizing the existence/non existence of a God. People like Robert Tulip...
It is fascinating how ant has invented this imaginary Robert Tulip who bears little resemblance to me.

Of course science considers the question of God. As Laplace told Napoleon, "I have no need of that hypothesis." Laplace did not assert that the theory of a supernatural existent God was disproved, merely that talk of God as existing is superfluous and harmful to any rational or ethical endeavour.

Leaving aside these landmines in the path of our galumphing ant, my view is that there is a divine intelligence within nature. The divine is seen in laws such as gravity and evolution, which are omnipotent, omnipresent and eternal. These laws are what Psalm 19 meant in saying "the firmament sheweth his handywork, day unto day uttereth speech." God speaks in the natural logic of the language of mathematics.

As to the problem of purpose, it is scientifically basic to observe that the protoplanetary disk of the sun five billion years ago contained the potential for intelligence to evolve within it. This must be true because it actually happened. So we might say, the telos of the material disk contained intelligence as its potential result, just as the purpose of an acorn contains a mature oak tree. This need not imply any external shaper, because the far more elegant and coherent story is that the consistent interaction of material things enabled an ever increasing complexity on earth, with each step governed by the iron laws of physics and evolution.

The arrogance in this debate comes from the supernatural fantasists. It really is impious towards the divine operation of physical law to assert that some psychological fantasy, some primitive political myth, some patriarchal control agenda, some accidental or intentional corruption of enlightened texts, some unconscious social projection, some imaginary emotional comfort blanket, some irrational desire for belief in a magical creating entity, may be more real than the universally consistent and coherent and magnificent beauty and simplicity of physics.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Oct 09, 2013 6:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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