Posts by hooberus

165

evolution question

by outsmartthesystem in

it has taken me almost 2 years to get to the bottom of the watchtower society rabbit hole.

being fully convinced that i was duped....i am still a little ashamed of myself for being so narrow minded.

i have vowed never to close off my mind like that again.

hooberus

Science works tirelessly to falsify everything it knows--every theory is rigorously tested and as new understanding is gained, the process starts all over again. No theory is safe--

Are you implying that this is actually happening in regards to things like:

1. abiogenesis,

2. The overall (molecules to man), evolutionary version of history.

3. or even merely the evolutionary mechanism of mutation/selection?

Are you saying that that "science" [i.e. the "evolutionary science community"] is really "tirelessly" trying to falsify them??

What is the evidence for this? For example do they publish any attempted falisifications?, or fund any attempted falsification experiments, or studies against any of these things?

No theory is safe-- if it were it would be religion. NC

So if hypothetically the overall naturalistic/evolutionary version of history has been made "safe" by its proponets , then its religion?

57

Difficulties understanding passage.

by s-c-3-1-3 in

i am reading colossians 1:15-18, and understand it to mean that jehovah created jesus who then created all other things in the world, thus jesus crall things except for god who created him.

is this correct?

thanks in advance!.

Difficulties understanding passage.

by s-c-3-1-3 in

i am reading colossians 1:15-18, and understand it to mean that jehovah created jesus who then created all other things in the world, thus jesus crall things except for god who created him.

is this correct?

thanks in advance!.

Newton, Einstein, Naturalism, and Walking Fish- Naturalism vs Supernaturalism. Put up or Shut up!!!

by whereami in

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbswkmobrl8&feature=digest_sun.

hooberus

me:

First of, ID doesn't prove God at all. what ID is struggling to show is that there must be intelligence behind earths biological life. If there's intelligence to be found then God is one of the valid options to consider. . .

2nd, Intelligent Design, does not offer any useful advancement & prediction on the application of science:"ID seeks to redefine science in a fundamental way that would invoke supernatural explanations, a viewpoint known as theistic science. It puts forward a number of arguments, the most prominent of which are irreducible complexity and specified complexity, in support of the existence of a designer.[4] The scientific community rejects the extension of science to include supernatural explanations in favor of continued acceptance of methodological naturalism,

If, God potentially is one of the "valid options" to consider, then shouldn't the "scientific community" not "reject" him even as an option?

51

Putting the 'probability argument' against abiogenesis in the grave once and for all

by bohm in

jw
friends

amongst the many arguments for and against creation the probability arguments stands out.

the improbability of generating the necessary proteins by chanceor the genetic information to produce themto balloon beyond comprehension.

... the odds of getting even one functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance from a prebioitc soup is no better than 1 chance in 10164. meyer continues, another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specific particle among all the particles in the universe.. the evidence for the probability of origin of life arising from darwins warm little pond seems to have vanished beyond the realm of any possibilityregardless of any early earth scenario.. i really, really want to put it in the grave because i think its an embaressment to the theists and thinking humans in general; its right up there with 'noahs ark has been found' and 'humans have less chromosomes than monkeys', but for some reason people dont see through it.

hooberus

I really, really want to put it in the grave because i think its an embaressment to the theists and thinking humans in general; Its right up there with 'noahs ark has been found' and 'humans have less chromosomes than monkeys', but for some reason people dont see through it.

One of the reasons i hate it so much is that the people who quote it does not have any idea what the statement they make really say. The key is the use of the word 'chance', 'assembled at random', etc. – notice that this is included by all the scientists who actually calculate the probabilities, but omitted by all creationist.
Thats for a reason: the probability is strictly true, but it only cover one very limited model for how proteines are assembled (at random), and does not consider other paths; essentially it leave out the fact that the world is governed by physical laws.

This point may seem technical, and i am quite sure that a lot think that it does not matter much, if the propability is 10^-3000 there is a rather large room for error. The thing is that it is not a trivial point and it invalidate the entire calculation before the question has been resolved. I will demonstrate that by a simple example:

Yesterday i heard a noise from the kitchen. I ran out and saw a large number of rice on the floor, and my girlfriend was standing with a half-empty bag of rice. There are two options: Either she spilled the rice, ie it landed on the floor 'on random', or she carefully designed the configuration of the rice. Lets try to use creationist math to determine if there is 'intelligent' (mischiveous) design involved:

The first thing we have to do is to ignore physical laws, causal history and all that junk (thats what we do with proteines, remember?) so in this case we ignore gravity. Then, just as with proteines, we have to specify our 'configuration space'. When we have ignored gravity, the rice can be anywhere in the room (litterally!).
A grain of rice is at most 3 mm high. The room is 3 m. high. That mean that a grain of rice can be placed (vertically) in about 3m / 3mm = 1000 = 10^3 places. Lets say there is 100 grains of rice on the floor, then the probability to see all 100 lying on the floor is 10^-300. Want lower probability? just add rice or (the horror!) she may have dropped the rice outdoors..

Holy fucking shit batman! 10^-300'th must rule out the 'random' hypothesis, surely my girlfriend must have painstakingly placed the grains of rice on the floor one by one, surely i must scold her for calling it an accident and blaming 'random'!

But i am wrong. The real probabillity, when you do not ignore physical laws and causal history is 1, because rice automatically fall to the floor because of gravity. Thats why we cant ignore stuff like gravity, thats why nature has to enter into our equations unless there are extremely good arguments why it can be left out.

My example might sound artificial, but how about two beaches where on one the rocks are small and on the other the rocks are very large? ripples in the sand? Cloud formation? The earths magnetic field? Neutron stars? All of these are examples that the naive 'lets ignore physics'-calculations will tell us must be explicitly designed and they are wrong. Nature trivially do this because of some mechanisms that are hard to pin-point a-priori and have to enter into the calculation.

Thats why the 'probability' arguments are so extremely stupid. The person is REALLY arguing that, as in the case of rice, you can just ignore physics, that the system does not exhibit criticallity or complex behaviour and behave more like a cloud of gas at high temperature. They are making that statement without even knowing what enviroment we are discussing, what temperatures the system is at, or what it contain; its just a bunch of unfounded assumptions that the person dont even KNOW they should test or argue for.

And here is an example as well. What if the rice grains on the floor also spelled out the phrase "RICE IS GOOD FOR FOOD BECAUSE IT IS NUTRICIOUS."? Do we then ignore chance probability calculations as evidence for intelligent design because of the mere "fact that the world is governed by physical laws [like chemistry]"?

7

Christian Imbeciles Embarrass Themselves At A Bill Nye The Science Guy Lecture.

by Low-Key Lysmith in

jw
friends

http://www.thinkatheist.com/profiles/blogs/bill-nye-bood-in-texas-for.

this doesn't represent all christians.

just kinda scary to think that there are some people out there who really think like this..

hooberus

We creationists aren't as smart as you evolutionists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOPkXFTd5Rs

52

Proving Thor Exist: Reason why the proofs of God fail.

by bohm in

jw
friends

had there been theistic/atheistic debates 1300 years ago, my relatives might have heard this definite argument for the thundergod thor:.

without thor there can be no lightning.lightning exist.therefore thor exist.

qed.the atheist in that time would properly have gone after #1. i imagine the theist would have said:.

hooberus

HOWEVER read my original post. For this to be evidence for God, one must argue why "god did it" produce a good explanation for these features, as with the case of Thor i would argue the theistic explanations is extremely poor.

What is "extremely poor" is the analogy between your Thor existence "arguments", and modern properly writtten theistic arguments. Your first Thor thunder argument is weak to begin with, as little evidence is given (unlike for example a theistsic fine-tuning, or orign of life argument, which use things like probabilities), and it was likely later falsified (unlike theistsic arguments which have not been, despite attempts).

52

Proving Thor Exist: Reason why the proofs of God fail.

by bohm in

jw
friends

had there been theistic/atheistic debates 1300 years ago, my relatives might have heard this definite argument for the thundergod thor:.

without thor there can be no lightning.lightning exist.therefore thor exist.

qed.the atheist in that time would properly have gone after #1. i imagine the theist would have said:.

hooberus

These can easily be explained:

Gravity, physical laws etc - they have to work as they do otherwise the universe couldnt have come into existence, if gravity was a different value the big bang would never have materialised into anything.

So by defination, they just work, else it wouldnt be here.

The Book "The Biotic Message" demosntrates why reasoning like the above is not a scientific explanation. The author refers to it as "the tautological anthropic principal".

Its somewhat similar to the saying "the universe has observable highly improbable features, because if it didn't it wouldn't exist, (and we wouldn't be to here observe the highly improbable features)." -It doesn't explain why it has the hightly improbable features to begin with.

"Why assume there is one universe? There have likely been multiple universes, most failing, ours works because the variables were correct.

As ReMine sows this is an explanation (as opposed to the tautological formulation), however it not testable, hense not science according to evolutionists standard.

http://saintpaulscience.com/contents.htm

"Shows the anthropic principle is not testable, and so not science by evolutionists' own criterion. It reveals an illusion involving a three-shell game ruse, much like is later revealed for natural selection."

282

Non-evidence reasons why people embrace Evolution.

by hooberus in

jw
friends

evolutionists always claim that the reason why they believe in evolution and reject creation is due to "evidence".

they frequently use the opposite term "no evidence" in relation to any type of intelligent design, or creation, (and especially to genesis creation and flood history !).

their advocated beliefs always tend to include whatever is necessary to believe in to intellectually "explain" the existence of the universe, world, and its creatures without needing god).

hooberus

now we are getting somewhere. By evolution i mean the process of evolution (mutation, selection, etc. see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_(biologi)

).

Evolution (as defined above) increase the amount of information no matter which measure one use and it is trivial to demonstrate. Take kolmogorov complexity (which is the length of the minimal program which can output a given sequence) and consider a sequence of DNA like: "ABATAAATTTDDD" (repeated 500 times), now consider the same sequence randomized by various mutations; the kolmogorov complexity of the last sequence will be larger than the first.

A brief question on this subject bohm.

Would you also say that randomizing your posts with various letter mutations will also increase the amount of information no mater what measure one uses?

282

Non-evidence reasons why people embrace Evolution.

by hooberus in

jw
friends

evolutionists always claim that the reason why they believe in evolution and reject creation is due to "evidence".

they frequently use the opposite term "no evidence" in relation to any type of intelligent design, or creation, (and especially to genesis creation and flood history !).

their advocated beliefs always tend to include whatever is necessary to believe in to intellectually "explain" the existence of the universe, world, and its creatures without needing god).

hooberus

Look at those highlighted "reasons", now why on Earth would anyone refer to something like that as "scientific reasons for creationism"?

I don't see anyone here specifically referring to "those" highlighted reasons as "scientific reasons" for creationism.

Hooberus, I'm dead serious I want you to tell me exactly why you would refer to this above passage as evidence at all?

I didn't refer to the above passage at all specifically -let alone as "[scientific] evidence".

You fail to understand that the book insn't meant to be solely and only a scientific apologetic, but instead a series of individual testimonies as to "why 50 scientists believe in creation". Therefore the book gives a variety of reasons as to what influenced them, yes some are scriptural , and some are scientific.

To refresh your memory,

1. Another poster recommended this book for scientific information supportinig biblical creationism, and it does contain much in that way, along with biblical and other reasons as well (perhaps he should have stated this as well to you).

2. You then (obviously without reading it), tried to dismiss it as faulty because of an alleged faulty "main [scientific] argument" I simply pointed out that you obviously hadn't read it since it contains no speciifc "main [scientific] argument." I also then posted the online book for anyone to see.

3. Your resonse was then to highlight some scriptural reasons from one of the 50 authors and then pretend that he (and I) refer to "those" reasons as "scientific reasons" for creationism.

Please point out the scientific data, and could you tell me why if a scientist has to put away all of his evidence so he can believe in young earth creationims, why you will take his unfounded claims as proof instead of all the evidence he had to put aside?

Apparently you can't read even your own paste carefully, since the author states that in his opinion "there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth".