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.