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Excluding Intelligent Design Principles From the Search For Alien Life
KIdPanda writes "Prompted by pictures of man-made structures in the Utah desert, a SETI astronomer explains the sometimes-ambiguous difference between seeing the hand of God, alien intelligence, or nature. 'In my photographs, Shostak's SETI-trained eye — standing in for a pattern-crunching computer program — searched for an unexpected increase in visual order (or, in thermodynamic terms, a decrease in entropy caused by the rebellion of life against universal decay). A road or a tended field is mathematically simpler than a mountainous jumble or naturally varied vegetation. ... But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design."
"But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design." What? I don't understand how something not being simple enough for our limited intelligence to understand constitutes divine creation?
space is vastly more complex than a tended field, but we can only perceive bits at a time
The "inky blackness of space" is only simple if interpreted by a spectrally-limited human eye seeing only a tiny part of it from a distance. Space is crammed with a chaotic mess of strange crap on the macroscale and a lot more weird junk on the micro. Quasars, dark matter, nebulae, dark energy, black holes, virtual particles, gluon soup, quarks....
I will, as they say on the Internets, fix that for you:
If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is in no way evidence of design.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Sometimes stuff that looks artificial can actually be natural. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes.
Throw in references to intelligent design to get a bunch of people in a tizzy and drive page hits.
Obviously, ID fails to impress us with its (lack of) logical hypotheses. I would like to see the ID crowd come up with an actual science that could predict whether something was created by an intelligence (and predict what "level" of intelligence created it). At least it would lend them some credence and provide a factual basis for their (and our) arguments.
"There is nothing intelligently designed about our universe. Shit works because, well, if it didn't work, we wouldn't be standing her talking about it. It works because of the sheer necessity that if it didn't work, the universe would fail."
Wow... this was a coherent, solid scientific statement.
Good point. Efficiency is a better way to put it.
And one huge source of efficiency is to not unnecessarily modify the environment around you. Sustaining a highway takes an enormous amount of work. Doubly so in a mountain pass. It can be much much more efficient to build a mountain road that's mostly under ground to avoid fighting the constant battle with the elements. It also makes it largely invisible.
Why terraform a planet when you can just change the settlers to easily survive on it.
This argument seems to get the Intelligent Design argument backwards. The ID people argue that complexity can't arise from simplicity, and thus complexity is the signature of design. This guy seems to be arguing that simplicity is the signature of design.
Neither one is particulary a good argument. Complex things can arise from simple ones-- a snowflake can arise from water vapor. And simple thing can arise from complex ones: water vapor can arise from a snowflake.
In either case entropy increases, and heat, ultimately, is dissipated into space.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You mean problems apart from literally believing a book that's been through several translations from extinct languages and wasn't written down at all until many generations after the events allegedly happened?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
The Forge of God
It's all there.
A civilization with practically unlimited access to energy would not optimize energy usage. Basically life as we know it uses up all available resources and maximizes effect instead of minimizing consumption. There might be a situation where a civilization only uses the most easily available resources because spreading to find more easily exploitable resources is more efficient than exploiting less accessible resources without traveling. But then the overall output would still be more than our output and should still be detectable.
It's actually really simple. ID can never be proved or disproved because we're stuck inside the object in question. To accurately determine if something is the result of design or chance, you have to be able to have a perspective outside the object to compare it with other objects. Since we can't get outside our universe to see if there are other universes (and if so, compare them to ours) we have no way to know for sure. Ours could be intelligently designed from top to bottom to look random to us, and we'd be none the wiser.
So it all boils down to whether or not you want to believe in a "someone" (ie. God) that's always existed, or matter that has always existed. But you will never in this life know for sure whether you're right or wrong.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
The benchmark of design is not simplicity. The benchmark is probably better described as specified complexity. A good way of spotting design is perhaps to observe an irreducibly complex mechanism that efficiently achieves a purpose. A field may be cleared intentionally, but a clearing in a forest may also naturally occur, so this is not a good example of spotting design.
The classic example is a mousetrap. None of the parts of the mousetrap are particularly useful on their own, but if you obtain them all seperately, then arrange them in a very specific way, the result is a very efficient mouse catching device.
This device is complicated, but not random. The complexity that makes it functional is specified by the person who intentionally assembled the mousetrap, but such a device would not naturally occur. It is irreducibly complex because taking away any of the parts it is composed of would cause it to cease functioning. This means that its function was intentional and had to be conceived as a whole rather than arrived at by gradual steps (since no step along the way would be any closer to the purpose, until the whole mousetrap is built).
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
You'd presume God to be real, but not Allah? You do know that Allah is a different language, not a different god right? Muslim's call their god Allah because they speak Arabic. Christians who speak Arabic also call their god Allah.
And you say that the Buddha's teachings are in direct conflict with Scientific theory. Which one? The teaching where he said that you are to judge for your self the validity of his teachings and not accept anything just because it came from him? Yeah, how unscientific. It's much, much, more scientific to insist people have faith in a teaching and to disregard any evidence to the contrary, isn't it?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I think you have high and low entropy the wrong way round.
Now let's look at your examples : -> a perfectly flat desert : LOW entropy. Perhaps a bit higher than a not-quite-flat-but-looking-flat desert, but defineately LOW entropy.
Nope. It's the other way around. When you can't find a pattern, it's high entropy. The desert in this example is not a flat monomolecular sheet, it's white noise of sand. You don't get much higher entropy than this.
Therefore it is not made by an intelligence. (according to this measure)
You can't possibly make that deduction based on the entropy level. Intelligence can obviously create objects with either high or low entropy.
-> The surface of most gas planets : LOW entropy (obviously). Compare it to earth's ocean floor. It is mostly very, very flat. When a robot is standing on the ocean floor, he will see kilometers of perfectly flat dark terrain. The only real features, like volcanoes or sunken ships, come from external activity with high entropy (though not necessarily intelligence) That terrain does not have instabilities. It has very, very LOW entropy.
Same thing here. You completely misunderstood what entropy is.
Therefore you can conclude it not to be man-made. You'd conclude the ships to be intelligently-made, which is correct, but you'd also call the volcanoes intelligently-made which is not correct. Unless the zulus are right and we better start throwing women into volcanoes to placate the volcano god, that is.
You can't conclude anything. Especially when you don't have a clue of what entropy is.
Now let's take another example.
Let's not. Instead, read up entropy, and then, maybe, start discussing the subject matter.
"Atheists believe they are themselves, gods"
Well, you believe that they believe that, but that's not the same thing is it? I mean, you presumably believe yourself to be making sense, yet you're not. Why couldn't you be just as wrong about atheists?
The great thing about science and everything in this universe of ours is that it doesn't give a shit what you think. Just because you think evolution is morally wrong and unjust and you don't want to live in a world with evolution, does not mean that evolution isn't fact. It simply does not matter what you think or how evolution makes you feel.
And how exactly could evolution ever be the guiding principle in anyone's life, atheist or otherwise? Atheism is the absence of belief in god, christian or any other kind. Just because an atheist does not believe in a christian god does not mean they have to find one somewhere else, so they aren't substituting evolution for god. Atheism doesn't worship anything, because there is nothing to worship.
I'm also curious how christian "morality" has conquered anything. I'm even more curious how hiding behind an old book even approaches morality, rather than having to think about your values and forming your own based on what you think. That takes real work while "christian" morality requires the ability to read.
More like the opposite. As far as particle physics and quantum mechanics are concerned, it looks very much like there are just a few different possible charges (for example). The multitude of different particles is a combination of very limited set of properties (electric charge being one of them).
In a designed universe, every particle could have been designed different. In an universe that has developed as dictated by rather simple laws, every particle also follows these laws, and in this case it means that no, electrons could not be different from each others.
Similarity of particles does not disprove a creator, of course. It does tell us that if the universe was "created", it was probably created by creating universal laws of physics, not by creating individual particles like electrons.
Too bad that "universe created by creating some universal laws of physics" is indistinguishable from "universe arising from a random quantum fluctuation with certain properties, we call the universal laws of physics" or some other non-creator origin theory...