SETI is making a basic assumption. It seems a reasonable one, but still, it is not the same as the claim the ID formulators like Dembski make that you can mathematically determine design on an object or phenomona. SETI's assumption is basically that a technologically advanced civilization out there in the cosmos will, in basic ways, use the same sorts of technologies we do. In short, we're applying the basic rule we always do to trying to determine design in other branches of science; is this artifact what I would make?
The IDologists like to have it both ways:
1) That's (vaguely) similar to something we have done, therefore it is the work of an intelligent designer.
2) Even our best boffins can't do that, therefore it is the work of an intelligent designer.
In short, everything is evidence for intelligent design. (That's what happens when your goal is to justify your religious beliefs rather than to find out what actually causes something.)
A problem to watch out for is that if you add your own research to Wikipedia (even with all the proper citations), you'll get slapped by some self-important wikipedian because it is apparently wrong and evil to have the person directly responsible for the research itself to be included in the creation of encyclopedia content about said research.
Or some idiot who doesn't actually know anything about the topic will edit it to enshrine his own ignorance instead.
I quit contributing to articles in my field long before I quit editing just-for-fun articles.
We humans think that self-replicating cells arose randomly from the "primordial soup" of the early oceans. Yet, despite science and technology's efforts we have not come even within light years of building any sort of machine that can take bare elements and make a copy of itself, which in turn copies itself etc. How is it that we can intelligently attribute to chance and time what we cannot do ourselves?
God, what a stupid post.
1) What are you going to do in a few years when the artificial life people do get their self-replicating metabolizing systems working. (Somehow I doubt that you've seen the literature on the topic.)
2) We can't do lots of other stuff that happens naturally; what's the problem with us not being able to create life in a test tube (yet)?
3) Whence the argument, "we smart guys can't even do it, therefore some intelligent designer must have"?
All in all, I liked it better than the later Roger Moore Bond films. By that time he seemed to be mugging and smirking his way through the films, laughing all the way to the bank.
The series degenerated toward comedy in the Moore era. By the time they got to Octopussy, it actually *worked* as comedy.
IMHO the billions in bailout dollars should translate into checks sent to citizens. Afterall it's our money, why shouldn't we get it? That way people would be able to pay their mortgage, keep the lights/gas on, put up a down payment on a new car, or spend spend spend this upcoming Christmas.
Probably the best solution would have been to bail out the bad mortgages themselves, and let the resulting trickle-up keep the banks solvent.
However, that would be seen as handouts to the middle and lower classes, and the current generation of politicians thinks only handouts to the rich are morally acceptable.
But it's not the least bit surprising that the last act of the current Administration would be to shovel 5417loads of taxpayer dollars directly into the pockets of the richest slice of society. Been doing it indirectly for eight years, and no point in trying to hide it on the way out the gate.
"Space travel is utter bilge" - Richard van der Riet Wolley, Astronomer Royal, 1955.
He was right. Back in 1955, he crunched the numbers, and realized that you couldn't build a rocket that lifted itself into orbit while carrying much of a payload.
And we should base all our public policy on the best numbers available from 1955.
Even if the incoming administration eliminated NASA they wouldn't recover enough to pay for the various giveaways (e.g., bailouts, economic, stimulus checks, etc.).
Surely you're not suggesting that the taxpayers shouldn't fund the handouts that allow failed companies to pay stock dividends and employee bonuses!
However, these things should be judged on their merits. Has anyone gone back to examine the impact (if any) of the stimulus checks from a while back?
Instead of throwing money at healthcare, figure out why health care is expensive.
That's a no-brainer: lawyers and insurance companies have to get their cuts.
Oh, and you're sponsoring the pharmaceuticals' profits because your Congress won't let you import your medicine. "Not safe", they say, even though the pills you and your Canadian neighbor eat roll out of the same factory in Ireland.
Those inferior Socialist countries in western Europe have wider healthcare at a lower price, because their politicians aren't pwned by the middle men that US citizens have to sponsor with their health care costs.
And before you even start, 'promote the general welfare' != 'ensure/provide the general welfare'.
If you're going to make up your own interpretations, why quote the document to begin with?
People should be given the ability to achieve, not the assurance that they will achieve.
If you think such Federal programs assure success, you obviously don't know anyone who relies on them.
Also, assuming you know anyone who works for a living, you might want to look at one of their check stubs and see what they're paying besides their income tax.
I have a feeling that when Hollywood hears the words 'science fiction' they immediately think special effects and action and how they can maximise those things for the viewing experience.
Not just SF. This year's Jones and Bond outings were all chase and fight, utterly devoid of all the other stuff that makes for a good movie.
Hell, I can't even tell you what Solace was about.
Hollywood movies are degenerating into big budget laser light shows: "Gee that's cool, but...."
Sometimes stuff that looks artificial can actually be natural. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes.
Ultimately, SETI and ID would like to have the same thing: a rule or formula that can be applied to an observation to determine rigorously whether it is the byproduct of an intelligent agency.
However, SETI knows that no such rule exists, and though they have software that flags 'interesting' stuff for their attention, they are still left with ordinary scientific procedures for determining what the cause of the observation actually is. (And in one case we got pulsars rather than 'aliensdidit'.)
ID pretends that such a rule does exist, which they then proceed to apply to some trivial phenomenon and pronounce loudly that they've proven that 'pretend-we're-not-talking-about-God' exists.
Their most famous rules (irreducible complexity, complex specified information, etc.) generally take the form of a (bogus) proof that evolution could not have produced the phenomenon, to which they must apply a non sequitur in order to conclude that pwntaG is the cause.
Speaking of CSI, crime scene investigators, intelligence agencies, and any number of other professions would like to have a magical device that would detect deliberate action among happenstance, but only ID professes to have that ability. The only interesting question is whether Behe and Dembski drink their own kool-aid and eat their own dogfood, of whether they cynically envision themselves as Plato's 'guardians' who handle the dangerous truths that need to be hidden from the general populace by religious myths.
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 <snip>
That's exactly what their 'intellectual' leaders (Behe, Dembski, Gonzalez, etc.) profess to be doing.
Of course, their claims don't stand up to the most casual scrutiny.
(Though for some reason creationists tend to find them convincing. Wonder why...)
How about predicting how a junkyard full of car parts can spontaneously, randomly become a running Ferrari or even only a Toyota automobile.
I'm curious who you think makes that prediction.
If you're thinking that's an analogy for biological evolution, you're wrong. Automobiles and their precursors don't reproduce themselves via error-prone self replication.
Objects that are designed by people (and, presumably, other intelligences) tend to be simpler than those created by nature. For example, compare the straight lines of a road with the wavy shape of a river.
Which is funny, because the IDologists infallibly invoke complexity as evidence of design.
I'd rephrase the statement "science is for understanding how we exist, spirituality is for understanding why" to, "Science is a discussion about how we exist; spirituality is a discussion about why we exist."
I'd phrase it as "science is the attempt to understand how things work and why they're the way they are; religion is a set of beliefs that invokes a fact-free metaphysical investigation of 'why' as one of its self-rationalizations".
So the multiverse theory postulates there are innumerable universes, each with different conditions, and ours happened to be the right conditions to support life as we understand it. How does this rule out the possibility of an intelligent creator?
It doesn't.
This whole "there is no God" argument of science versus spirituality is actually quite tiring. No matter how advanced science gets, it will never be able to disprove -- or prove, for that matter -- the existence of a God or gods. The very concept of a supernatural being does not lend itself to being explainable by science.
The concept of 'god' is too slippery for any evidence-based investigation.
Science does keep disproving specific claims made by religionists when they're foolish enough to let themselves get pinned down, but they infallibly reject the findings, move the goalposts, or revise their claims about god.
My question is, if no claim about gods stands up to scrutiny, why should I believe any of them? After all, the world is full of mutually contradictory religious claims, none better supported than the next. Should we each just draw a god out of the bag, and then argue vociferously for its existence?
I don't see infinite regression as somehow more scientifically 'valid' than saying there was some point some noodly appendage went "POOF" and it all started.
Maybe there really was no beginning to the regression.
OTOH, 'poof' doesn't actually solve the problem; it just starts a regression on where the creators (poofters?) came from.
However, "I don't know where it came from" remains scientifically sound, however unsatisfying it may be.
The anthropic princple in general just says that the Universe is the way it is because if it were not nobody would be here to see it. That does not imply that it was 'made for us', it just means that because we are seeing it, conditions are the way they are.
IOW, "if things were different, things would be different".
Interpretations of the anthropic principle range from vacuous to fallacious. I've never seen an interpretation that actually helps with the origins problem.
Of course, people who are desperate to prove that their favorite divinity exists will latch on to whatever argument that comes to hand, no matter how vacuous or fallacious.
Because the odds of 1 universe getting created that has the right properties for any complex systems to exist are beyond astronomical.
You forgot to show your calculations.
The truth is, whe don't have the faintest idea what free parameters our universe has, let alone what the probability distributions for those parameters are. Anyone who starts making claims about the odds without addressing those two issues is just bullshitting.
I think science is what you end up with if you don't accept "it just is" as an answer.
Right. Scientists and creationists both start with "I don't think that's the result of chance". The difference is that one takes it as 'proof' of a preconceived conclusion about what caused it, whereas the other starts trying to figure out what actually did cause it.
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SETI is making a basic assumption. It seems a reasonable one, but still, it is not the same as the claim the ID formulators like Dembski make that you can mathematically determine design on an object or phenomona. SETI's assumption is basically that a technologically advanced civilization out there in the cosmos will, in basic ways, use the same sorts of technologies we do. In short, we're applying the basic rule we always do to trying to determine design in other branches of science; is this artifact what I would make?
The IDologists like to have it both ways:
1) That's (vaguely) similar to something we have done, therefore it is the work of an intelligent designer.
2) Even our best boffins can't do that, therefore it is the work of an intelligent designer.
In short, everything is evidence for intelligent design. (That's what happens when your goal is to justify your religious beliefs rather than to find out what actually causes something.)
A problem to watch out for is that if you add your own research to Wikipedia (even with all the proper citations), you'll get slapped by some self-important wikipedian because it is apparently wrong and evil to have the person directly responsible for the research itself to be included in the creation of encyclopedia content about said research.
Or some idiot who doesn't actually know anything about the topic will edit it to enshrine his own ignorance instead.
I quit contributing to articles in my field long before I quit editing just-for-fun articles.
We humans think that self-replicating cells arose randomly from the "primordial soup" of the early oceans. Yet, despite science and technology's efforts we have not come even within light years of building any sort of machine that can take bare elements and make a copy of itself, which in turn copies itself etc. How is it that we can intelligently attribute to chance and time what we cannot do ourselves?
God, what a stupid post.
1) What are you going to do in a few years when the artificial life people do get their self-replicating metabolizing systems working. (Somehow I doubt that you've seen the literature on the topic.)
2) We can't do lots of other stuff that happens naturally; what's the problem with us not being able to create life in a test tube (yet)?
3) Whence the argument, "we smart guys can't even do it, therefore some intelligent designer must have"?
Don't you creationists ever think?
The anthropic principle is nothing like God, and many atheist scientists are perfectly happy to accept it.
Notice that I said we reject it as an argument for the existence of God, not that we reject it outright.
As an argument for the existence of God, it's just plain silly.
Daniel Craig plays Bond as an arrogant ass... exactly as he was in the books...
I thought Dalton was closest to the written stories... and for precisely that reason, one of the least fun of the movie Bonds.
All in all, I liked it better than the later Roger Moore Bond films. By that time he seemed to be mugging and smirking his way through the films, laughing all the way to the bank.
The series degenerated toward comedy in the Moore era. By the time they got to Octopussy, it actually *worked* as comedy.
IMHO the billions in bailout dollars should translate into checks sent to citizens. Afterall it's our money, why shouldn't we get it? That way people would be able to pay their mortgage, keep the lights/gas on, put up a down payment on a new car, or spend spend spend this upcoming Christmas.
Probably the best solution would have been to bail out the bad mortgages themselves, and let the resulting trickle-up keep the banks solvent.
However, that would be seen as handouts to the middle and lower classes, and the current generation of politicians thinks only handouts to the rich are morally acceptable.
But it's not the least bit surprising that the last act of the current Administration would be to shovel 5417loads of taxpayer dollars directly into the pockets of the richest slice of society. Been doing it indirectly for eight years, and no point in trying to hide it on the way out the gate.
"Space travel is utter bilge" - Richard van der Riet Wolley, Astronomer Royal, 1955.
He was right. Back in 1955, he crunched the numbers, and realized that you couldn't build a rocket that lifted itself into orbit while carrying much of a payload.
And we should base all our public policy on the best numbers available from 1955.
Even if the incoming administration eliminated NASA they wouldn't recover enough to pay for the various giveaways (e.g., bailouts, economic, stimulus checks, etc.).
Surely you're not suggesting that the taxpayers shouldn't fund the handouts that allow failed companies to pay stock dividends and employee bonuses!
However, these things should be judged on their merits. Has anyone gone back to examine the impact (if any) of the stimulus checks from a while back?
Instead of throwing money at healthcare, figure out why health care is expensive.
That's a no-brainer: lawyers and insurance companies have to get their cuts.
Oh, and you're sponsoring the pharmaceuticals' profits because your Congress won't let you import your medicine. "Not safe", they say, even though the pills you and your Canadian neighbor eat roll out of the same factory in Ireland.
Those inferior Socialist countries in western Europe have wider healthcare at a lower price, because their politicians aren't pwned by the middle men that US citizens have to sponsor with their health care costs.
And before you even start, 'promote the general welfare' != 'ensure/provide the general welfare'.
If you're going to make up your own interpretations, why quote the document to begin with?
People should be given the ability to achieve, not the assurance that they will achieve.
If you think such Federal programs assure success, you obviously don't know anyone who relies on them.
Also, assuming you know anyone who works for a living, you might want to look at one of their check stubs and see what they're paying besides their income tax.
But congress will never pass the line item veto or adopt a ban on earmarks.
I think they did pass the LIV, and the courts struck it down as contrary to the constitution's specs for the budget process.
As long as Will Smith isn't in any more of them. Between Independence Day, I Robot, and I am Legend I think he has saturated this market enough.
He has saturated *all* markets too much. You can't go to a movie without seeing a trailer for an upcoming WS film.
I have a feeling that when Hollywood hears the words 'science fiction' they immediately think special effects and action and how they can maximise those things for the viewing experience.
Not just SF. This year's Jones and Bond outings were all chase and fight, utterly devoid of all the other stuff that makes for a good movie.
Hell, I can't even tell you what Solace was about.
Hollywood movies are degenerating into big budget laser light shows: "Gee that's cool, but...."
...The Anthropic principle isn't that far from god, that's why scientists aren't very happy to just accept that ....
Uh...
1) Scientists reject the anthropic principle as a justification for God, because it isn't a logically sound argument.
2) Most scientists in the USA *do* believe in God.
Sometimes stuff that looks artificial can actually be natural. Telling the difference can be hard sometimes.
Ultimately, SETI and ID would like to have the same thing: a rule or formula that can be applied to an observation to determine rigorously whether it is the byproduct of an intelligent agency.
However, SETI knows that no such rule exists, and though they have software that flags 'interesting' stuff for their attention, they are still left with ordinary scientific procedures for determining what the cause of the observation actually is. (And in one case we got pulsars rather than 'aliensdidit'.)
ID pretends that such a rule does exist, which they then proceed to apply to some trivial phenomenon and pronounce loudly that they've proven that 'pretend-we're-not-talking-about-God' exists.
Their most famous rules (irreducible complexity, complex specified information, etc.) generally take the form of a (bogus) proof that evolution could not have produced the phenomenon, to which they must apply a non sequitur in order to conclude that pwntaG is the cause.
Speaking of CSI, crime scene investigators, intelligence agencies, and any number of other professions would like to have a magical device that would detect deliberate action among happenstance, but only ID professes to have that ability. The only interesting question is whether Behe and Dembski drink their own kool-aid and eat their own dogfood, of whether they cynically envision themselves as Plato's 'guardians' who handle the dangerous truths that need to be hidden from the general populace by religious myths.
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 <snip>
That's exactly what their 'intellectual' leaders (Behe, Dembski, Gonzalez, etc.) profess to be doing.
Of course, their claims don't stand up to the most casual scrutiny.
(Though for some reason creationists tend to find them convincing. Wonder why...)
How about predicting how a junkyard full of car parts can spontaneously, randomly become a running Ferrari or even only a Toyota automobile.
I'm curious who you think makes that prediction.
If you're thinking that's an analogy for biological evolution, you're wrong. Automobiles and their precursors don't reproduce themselves via error-prone self replication.
Objects that are designed by people (and, presumably, other intelligences) tend to be simpler than those created by nature. For example, compare the straight lines of a road with the wavy shape of a river.
Which is funny, because the IDologists infallibly invoke complexity as evidence of design.
I'd rephrase the statement "science is for understanding how we exist, spirituality is for understanding why" to, "Science is a discussion about how we exist; spirituality is a discussion about why we exist."
I'd phrase it as "science is the attempt to understand how things work and why they're the way they are; religion is a set of beliefs that invokes a fact-free metaphysical investigation of 'why' as one of its self-rationalizations".
So the multiverse theory postulates there are innumerable universes, each with different conditions, and ours happened to be the right conditions to support life as we understand it. How does this rule out the possibility of an intelligent creator?
It doesn't.
This whole "there is no God" argument of science versus spirituality is actually quite tiring. No matter how advanced science gets, it will never be able to disprove -- or prove, for that matter -- the existence of a God or gods. The very concept of a supernatural being does not lend itself to being explainable by science.
The concept of 'god' is too slippery for any evidence-based investigation.
Science does keep disproving specific claims made by religionists when they're foolish enough to let themselves get pinned down, but they infallibly reject the findings, move the goalposts, or revise their claims about god.
My question is, if no claim about gods stands up to scrutiny, why should I believe any of them? After all, the world is full of mutually contradictory religious claims, none better supported than the next. Should we each just draw a god out of the bag, and then argue vociferously for its existence?
I don't see infinite regression as somehow more scientifically 'valid' than saying there was some point some noodly appendage went "POOF" and it all started.
Maybe there really was no beginning to the regression.
OTOH, 'poof' doesn't actually solve the problem; it just starts a regression on where the creators (poofters?) came from.
However, "I don't know where it came from" remains scientifically sound, however unsatisfying it may be.
The anthropic princple in general just says that the Universe is the way it is because if it were not nobody would be here to see it. That does not imply that it was 'made for us', it just means that because we are seeing it, conditions are the way they are.
IOW, "if things were different, things would be different".
Interpretations of the anthropic principle range from vacuous to fallacious. I've never seen an interpretation that actually helps with the origins problem.
Of course, people who are desperate to prove that their favorite divinity exists will latch on to whatever argument that comes to hand, no matter how vacuous or fallacious.
Because the odds of 1 universe getting created that has the right properties for any complex systems to exist are beyond astronomical.
You forgot to show your calculations.
The truth is, whe don't have the faintest idea what free parameters our universe has, let alone what the probability distributions for those parameters are. Anyone who starts making claims about the odds without addressing those two issues is just bullshitting.
I think science is what you end up with if you don't accept "it just is" as an answer.
Right. Scientists and creationists both start with "I don't think that's the result of chance". The difference is that one takes it as 'proof' of a preconceived conclusion about what caused it, whereas the other starts trying to figure out what actually did cause it.