by Shining One 369 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Hoob:
You wouldn't accept that God used genetic "tweaks" to create a subdivision from a previous kind?
Cygnus:
It'll be interesting to see how those kids develop as the world's greatest minds and our leaders 40 years from now.
What concerns me is that the prevalence of data doesn't always result in a prevalence of information. Our world leaders don't appear to be any more savvy than the previous generation or two. In fact their oral communication skill seem to be deteriorating
Leolaia,
No I wasn't suggesting that gravity is God, I was suggesting that gravity is evidence we have already been exploring a reality beyond our abliity to comprehend, and beyond the physical.
Science calls gravity a force, however weak or strong at the quantum level (which invites a whole extra "realm" of discussion). Tetrapod.Sapien insists on tangible proof of Holy Spirit, for instance ... you see where this is going? You glibly mentioned the nuclear force holding atoms together. You joked about it being angels, or "midichlorians." That force is undeniably real, but what is it?
What the hell is a force? It is invisible, its presence can only be subtractively assessed from its impacts on tangible reality, but science has no problem accepting its existence. Apart from its effects, it can ONLY be metaphorically described but is considered real.
The nuclear force has no physical substance, but exists. Gravity has no physical substance, but exists. God has no physical substance, but does not exist. Tetrapod allows for the possibility that we may find God with further testing, but I submit that if he found God he would make up a name for God, describe God's observable, testable properties, poke God and prod God, and still insist it wasn't God.
Respectfully,
OldSoul
hooberus:
Regarding animals within phyla: It depends on what you mean by "related". If you mean "related" by having sharred similarities then yes. If you mean "related" by ancestor-descendant relationships then generally no.
In that case, I don't understand why you would expect all phyla to remain distinct. There is no particular reason that organisms should be so easily classifiable into hierarchical taxa if there is no true hierarchy of relatedness.
What the hell is a force? It is invisible, its presence can only be subtractively assessed from its impacts on tangible reality, but science has no problem accepting its existence. Apart from its effects, it can ONLY be metaphorically described but is considered real.The nuclear force has no physical substance, but exists. Gravity has no physical substance, but exists.
Check up on bosons. They are particle carriers of force. Leolaia did mention mesons, but I'm not sure if you caught that. A demonstrabley real example of a boson would be the photon, which is the particle carrier of the EM force. (You'd be surprised what you can learn from the X-Men comics. ). I believe that another name for the carrier particle for the strong nuclear force is the gluon. But "gravitons" as far as I know haven't been verified.
I side with the materialists on, what to me is, an inescapable point. That if the activity in the mystic's brain is genuinely due to something external, it'll have to have some material basis for interaction.
But maybe the following take can be used in your favour, or maybe you'll just want to distance yourself from me:
Would "spooky action at a distance" be a feasible mechanism for mystical experiences?
Quantum entanglement is real, but have physicists figured out how "the information" is transmitted between two particles? (and at faster than the speed of light to boot!) What if the neurochemical impulses that mystics perceive as another facet of reality are due to some conglomeration of "spooky actions at a distance" between their neurons and ___________ ?
I'm on a sugar/happy chemical high from the double decadent chocolate snack(s) I just had. I recommend it.
Hooberus, are you still a 'Young Earth Creationist' who believes in an Earth that is less than/approximately 10,000 years old?
If so, how can you credibly quote from a source which doesn't hold the same opinion? ReMine, for example, accepts standard time scales. Yet you are willing to quote him to support your argument when it suits you, despite the fact that his view are utterly incompatable with yours.
It would be like a Hindu quoting part of a Christian Bible-literalist YEC theory puportedly supporting a low age of the Earth to support a Hindu Creationist theory.
Anyway, ReMine's theory is something I'd be more than happy to "dig into"; what merit do you think it has?
Also, please be specific with these claims;
Please also provide actual examples to support this statement;
Evolution itself (as in the claim of the historical evolution) is quite conformable to "exceptions" (by its proponets) "to get out of sticky situations." See ReMine's "The Biotic Message" for numerous examples.
Hooberus,
>> I disagree, -the above theory can make predictions- for example: Combining the observed fact that in the living biota discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent and that all 30 phyla of living animals are separated from each other by a discontinous gap (Mayr What Evolution Is page 189) with the previous theory that: "God created the basic animal types separately and distinctly" we are thus thus able to generate predictions about what will be and will not be found in the living and fossil world such as: 1) All future animals discovered will be shown to belong to separate and distinct phyla in the living world 2) All animal phyla will be found to remain separate and distinct in the fossil record and not emerge other phyla.
It is not a logically coherent theory unless your definition of god has no creativity or intelligence. Basically what you are saying with your "theory" is that god is *incapable* of doing any different than what you have observed in the past. For instance, if god created a combination of a zebra and a fish tomorrow, where would that leave your theory? It really wouldn't falsify it unless your theory consists of a god with no creative (as in intelligent) capability. It has to be a rule-following machine. Can you guarantee that your god won't step outside of the rules? If you can, then your definition of god is not very godlike at all.
Evolutionary theories are different. They are falsifiable in principle because you don't have to worry about an intelligence changing his or her mind in the future. We are just dealing with slavish, rule following algorithmic processes. This is what allows us to model future predictions within computer simulations.
Can your theory be modeled in a computer simulation? If it can, then your god is no more intelligent than the algorithms programmed into the computer.
>> And, as I said previously, such a theory does not also require that God is also defined "out of a personality or any capacity for creativity" - It is simply a potentially falsifiable/predictive theory as to how creation occurred.
Even if you define your theory this narrowly it is not predictive or falsifiable. It is a "just so" story. You keep saying it's falsifiable, but what exactly would you be able to falsify? Falsifying a scenario is not falsifying the theory - you must be able to falsify the mechanism, and your mechanism is God. So how can you falsify your mechanism? You can't.
The fact is that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a predictive and falsifiable theory is.
rem
Midget-Sasquatch,
Would "spooky action at a distance" be a feasible mechanism for mystical experiences?
If that's the frame of reference from which you would understand the experience, I am happy to adopt it. I would add "inexplicable spook action at a distance" to make it more correct.
Gluon, boson, photon. Names we call things we can't see, taste, touch, feel, or hear that do stuff to our physical reality.
Imagine saying those words while high (glooooo-oooonnnnnn, booooooooooo-sahhhhhnnnn).
Once you are done having fun with that, imagine that I say they are just metaphorical constructs we use for interpretting observed phenomenon in physical reality that we assign labels to so we can pretend they are real in terms of Science.
Then demonstrate that the latter imagining is false.
Respectfully,
OldSoul
Gluon, boson, photon. Names we call things we can't see, taste, touch, feel, or hear that do stuff to our physical reality.
End-on view of one of three WZ events. The collision occured at the center of the detector. A Z boson decayed to two muons (two of the green tracks). A W boson candidate decayed to a muon and a neutrino (a green track and purple arrow opposite to it). Other lower energy charged-particles were produced in the collision and are represented as grey tracks. The straighter the track, the more energetic the particle. The red and blue towers in between the dark circles represent energy deposited in DZero calorimeter by the particles created in the collisions. (Click on image for larger version.)
The W and Z bosons are particles that carry the weak force, one of the four fundamental forces found in nature. According to the Standard Model, the W and Z bosons interact with each other due to their weak charge. At Fermilab, we measure the strength of the interaction of the W boson with the Z boson by identifying and studying collisions in which both are produced at the same time. By counting the number of occurrences and measuring the properties of the WZ events, we can test the strength of the interaction between the bosons.
W and Z particles are very massive. The W boson weights 85 times the mass of a proton. The Z boson is even heavier. Shortly after they are produced, W and Z bosons disintegrate into lighter types of particles and we detect these "decay products" in the DZero detector. The figure shows one of the DZero candidate events with W and Z bosons produced.
Fermilab's proton-antiproton collider, the Tevatron, is the only particle accelerator in the world that ever could produce both a W and a Z boson in the same collision. DZero scoured approximately 14 trillion collisions produced between April 2002 and June 2004 and found three events with both a W and a Z boson in them. We estimate that processes which look like, but aren't WZ production, will provide us three or more such events 3.5% of the time.
With these three candidate we are able to estimate the rate the Tevatron produces WZ events. Also, we set constraints on the strength of the interaction between the W and Z bosons.
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2005/today05-02-10.html
Leolaia,
Not actually observed, and I call foul. Scientists set it up as though observed but that isn't what happens. We don't observe anymore, not at that level of interaction.
We interpret the perception of what they are doing by the effects created, we cannot see them. This is an example of subtractive observation only, determination of cause by observed effect is not observation of cause.
Respectfully,
OldSoul
determination of cause by observed effect is not observation of cause.
But it gets us pretty close, doesn't it? Considering our limitations...
I see a lot of gobbledegook by creationists but I just don't see the logic behind their theories. We need the Creator to settle this matter once and for all, right now! But where is It? In Star Trek: The Motion Picture Vger was the most powerful and intelligent entity in the galaxy but all it was was a creation to assemble, collect, and transmit its data. Otherwise it was useless until it "joined" with its creator -- humans. Materialist scientists, like Vger, are constantly collecting and assemling data but we don't search for a creator, that isn't in their "programming." Even Christ recognized that some had no 'spiritual inclinations' and he called those that had them 'happy.' But in 2005 they don't seem happy; they seem to have a need for proof and explanation, because science and logic has wiped out the notion of a needed Creator. At least that's what Hawking said.
The cable guy is here to fix my TV cable so I'm signing out for now, be back soon.
