Using OO to develop a Turing-complete formal solution would require a Turing-complete description of the OO library you are working with, which would be a very surprising thing to find. The other possibility is that you are working on truly trivial software.
Thobald's proof #1 simply states that life has four characteristics (really just two since catalysis and energy utilization are synonyms in this context, and replication and information transmission are also synonyms. so life consists of that which reproduces and utilizes energy. How does this differentiate the two theories? I might make the same claim from Genesis 1:11 and 1:24-25.
Let's take Theobald's first complaint: He claims that Camp sets up a strawman argument that does not represent the original claim. I see nothing amiss with Camp's summary of Theobald, and Theobald's rebuttal does not either, since he claims that there is some general characteristic that Camp included that he should not have. He does not explain what that might be in his rebuttal, so his rebuttal does not close the loop and answer the critique.
There is also in most of Theobald's argumentation an apparently conscious effort to confound the conclusion with the assumptions granted. If I start an argument asking you to grant 'A' How can I claim that later steps prove 'A'? logically I should not do such a thing. Theobald also neglects the terms of the debate by assuming that proof on one side represents a disproof on the other, when such is not the case. Many of his 'proofs' can just as easily prove ID.
I am particularly amused by the use of phylogeny as a proof, since phylogeny is the ultimate in the "Because I say so." type of argument. The simple truth is if you let me arrange the data in any order I want I can 'prove' just about anything, and phylogeny is just that, an artificial and fungible arrangement of the numbers.
Would you trust a used car salesman that told you 'similar cars get 50 miles per gallon' if you knew that by 'similar' he meant 'have four wheels'?
Camp's complaints are valid when considered from the stand point of logic. Theobald's rebuttals seem to me to miss the point.
Theobald's defense of his tautology in the face of Camp boiling out his subterfugenous statements also does not answer the complaint
By the way, I do not expect you to change your mind in this forum. What I do hope for is that you would be more critical in reading what evolutionist write, to see the points where the logic does not hold up. Thanks for the reference to Camp, I had not seen his critiques of Theobald. I will definitely read them and see if they hold up.
One more observation about the creation/evolution debate is about the tools available to the sides: Creationists eschew deception, because we answer to a God who commands truth. Evolutionists, on the other hand, will use any tool that gives them an 'evolutionary advantage'. I expect there to be a qualitative differences in the arguments from one side (bound by truth) and the other (what ever works for me.)
In your last paragraph you show exactly the thinking I was talking about.
What if a person has examined the claims of evolutionists and finds them, as I do, to contain flawed assumptions?
Does critical thinking about evolution now equate to 'a very clear lack of good scientific judgement' just because we find a science writer's assumptions, methods, analysis or conclusions flawed?
Science is more than just nodding your head up and down in agreement with a PhD. In my case I have examined much of the evidence for evolution and found it wanting. I guess it really comes down to how much original thinking you want your scientist to do. Being critical of the accepted dogma of evolution requires original thinking, and that might not be what you need, if all you need is to fill a slot and suck down funding from atheistic decision makers.
If you need original thinking, you might want to consider all candidates, even ones that disagree with evolution.
In this context design is a synonym with biologically advantageous patterns. Your hypothesis is that such can arise spontaneously. The entire science of food preservation is based on the opposite hypothesis. ID predicts that life arises from life. Louis Pasteur's great contribution to science was to develop an experiment that proved this hypothesis.
He did so in face of generally held belief of his day that life arose spontaneously.
Why should evolution get a pass on falsifiability under this same standard? It predicts that life is random in origin, ID predicts that life consists of an original designed order that may be subject to information loss over time, and hence degradation. Such degradation in life is easily proved, most of the fruit-fly mutation experiments show this clearly, and would (if they were allowed to continue past the photogenicly stunted stage that fruit-fly populations easily reestablish their original (non-mutated) populations once you stop messing with them.(put the mutants in with unmutated flies and in a few generations all you have is unmutated flies. Boring.
The bible goes further, and provides an eye-witness account that it was 'Good' The bible also describes an epoch in which life was corrupted (before the flood), the end of this corrupted life in the flood, and a world essentially identical to the one we can go out and touch today.
There is no way that any past event can be proved, using this standard. I examined your reference during the last evolution/ID debate on/. What I discovered was that each of the evidences as a support for evolution is dependent on assumptions that may or may not be true. In addition, you would need to rule out that the similarities of species is due to them being from the same design house. We would think nothing of finding the same dimension on the same part in two different engines made by the same manufacturer, we would assume they found something that worked and stuck with it. The differences, of course, are due to a difference in the designer's intent for the end state or use of the engine.
The point of this is that ID proponents are not non-thinking, rather they are non-conformist to evolutionary dogma. I prefer to make up my own mind, rather than simply swallowing what someone with an agenda says. Does that mean I do not have an agenda of my own? No, it simply means mine is different from Scientific American's agenda.
I will even share my insidious plan: to make people curious about the world around them, curious enough to question authority and find out for themselves what the bible says about creation, and what creation says about the bible. No Pope, no Darwin, but a willingness to find out who this God is and why he made me.
Let the trolling begin. I read every rant, just to see if someone finds a creative way of calling my intelligence into question. I consider every thoughtful argument, and ignore most ad hominum attacks
It would be more correct to say that no amount of opinion will convince a creationist that they are wrong. Evidence is a different matter, and entirely lacking in this case.
One can not make the same observation of universal compatibility about evolution, because when we discover order in the universe it weakens evolution by making it less likely.
What ID proposes is a universe that contains design, and exhibits order as an original state, with disorder increasing from an original ordered state.
Thus, ID makes a prediction here: that there are ordered states that might be discovered with respect to complex systems such as life.
Why is that not a testable prediction? It seems to me that the drive to cure disease is infused with the idea that there is (or was in the past) a more desirable state than the one the victim is currently exhibiting. ID says that such a state does exist, and the Judeo-Christian God invites us to explore, and to find such hidden states.
Evolution requires a scientist to pursue his career at the expense of his soul, God invites a scientist to explore in the context of his soul, and promises that what is hidden can be found. Philosophically this allows me to abandon myself to my work (When that is appropriate) with the knowledge that God smiles on such an abandon, since he created me, this irresistible curiosity, and the capacity for abandoning myself into a problem.
My point was that evidence used to prove evolution do not falsify creation if the evidence can just as easily support ID. The truth is that science can not prove or disprove either idea of origins. What science can do is report on the structure of what exists today. ID predicts that everywhere we look we will find designed complexity devolving to chaos. Evolution predicts that we will find complexity evolving from chaos. Which idea fits better with your experience?
Quite right. The problem arises when the dogma is evolution, pretending to be science. It is preferable that the difficulties of any theory be exposed. Right now, ID proponents hold the role of Galileo to Sagan's Papacy.
Hmmm... What part of the ignorance do I address first? There are plenty of problems with using random mutation as a source of biodiversity, the primary problem being that information in DNA is stored in an error-correcting format, and by and large, mutation results in the death of the mutated organism. The other problem is that even when a mutation survives, it is grossly out numbered by unmutated examples of the species, which will tend to swamp the mutation in unmutated offspring. When normal mutation survival rates are applied to the stack of mutations required by the evolution, the time required for even a rather simple phylogenic branch takes well longer than the largest proposed age of the universe. Evolutionists resort to 'off stage' explanations, such as punctuated equilibrium to offset this problem. That places this back squarely in the realm of faith statements 'I'm sure it must have happened' without the benefit of science.
Because of the challenge that it represents to evolutionary dogma, such doubts must be censored by publications dedicated to the evolution idea, so I am not surprised that you are unaware of the problem. I rather imagine you are also unaware of the probability of the first cell arising by chance either.
I thought part of the scientific method was critical review. Why are you opposed to it?
Better would be to test on specifics of biology, such as the ATP cycle, the structure of DNA, the difference between Eucaryotic and Procaryotic cells and the biochemistry of glucose or similar subjects. Biology is a huge field. Origins is a microscopic field.
Really, what would be more useful than a speculation on eye evolution would be a precise definition of the biology of the eye, which does not require a scientist to hold any particular theory of origins. A evolution believer could claim to be researching the origins of the eye, the ID believer could claim to be researching the design of eye, either could make observations that benefit our understanding of the eye, and all of us would be better off. I think the Texas law is intended to allow the ID proponent to pursue such a career in the absence of prejudicial discrimination that has nothing to do with the work.
Science does not de-reference God, It shows what the design of something is. Proverbs 25:2 suggests that God takes delight in our finding out things we did not know. Such a finding does not make him less than he was, and the idea that you might someday find out all that things God has hidden is amazing. The more I find out about the universe the more I appreciate how little of it we actually know. A good example is the data streaming in from the Solar Dynamics Orbiter and the Stereo A/B satellites just now. We are finding out that we really do not know our own sun nearly as well as we thought. SDO could die today, and the data already taken would generate decades of writing.
Is such science dependent on a belief in evolution? I fail to see how.
Your mistake here is that you are intermixing the interpretation of data with data. Data is fact: "Layer 2 of sediment is 3.6 meters thick" Facts are verifiable, measurements are repeatable, subject to confidence measures and statistical validity. That is observational science. The problem comes in when you interprete the data: "There are 120 million years between the time layer 1 and and layer 3 were deposited." The interpretation may be correct, or it may not. Unless there are some independent measures that can confirm such an interpretation, it is just an opinion. What tends to happen in evolutionary circle is that some assumptions are treated uncritically, because they support an evolutionary hypothesis, while critique of the assumptions is suppressed.
ID et al calls evolution into question. They cannot both be true, hence the friction observable on this comment chain.
ID does not contradict science as the repeatable measurement of factual data, it calls into question assumptions used in the interpretation of that data WRT the origins question. Such debate is central to the scientific process, and ID proponents have as much right to speak to the interpretation of data as evolution proponents.
You could say that a process, unknown at this time, but subject to a set of laws and processes, was the source of the diversity that we see in life. The search for such a set of laws and processes could reveal much. Such a search does not endorse either evolution or intelligent design, it simply admits that we do not know everything about the universe.
Intron: the portion of DNA we do not understand yet.
Punctuated equilibrium is simply ID by another name: "Thing remain the same until Something Unexplained comes in and causes species to diverge."
How do you date the layers? by the fossils present. How do you date the fossils? By the layer they are found in. (that is directly from my GEO 163 class.) Fossils of different layers found in a common layer can be explained as post deposit aggregations, or as surviving archaic populations, depending on the fad of the day. So, No, finding a fossil in the wrong layer will not falsify evolution.
To be fair about this you would have to say that evolution theory has tonnage of evidence for which the alternate theory has no explanation. This is not so. Most of the articles I have seen in ID-friendly journals deal with problems inherent in interpretations of data used to support evolution. Why is that not science? Your statement about theories of creationism having no evidence is incorrect. What would be far more studied on your part would be to understand what the debate is about, rather than making absolutist statements. Do you see how close your absolutism takes you to the point of religion statement?
A better explanation of intelligent design is that there is too much information present in life to be accounted for by random mutation over the age of the universe. The result of this observation is that the information must originate in an intelligence, since the only sources we see for the origination of information is an intelligence. Hence, what is observed with life is that there is a design present in life.
The inescapable next question is: Who? This inescapable question is what places this in the realm of religion.
There is an entirely different question that can be asked: Can science prove how life originated? The answer to this is no, it cannot. Science is about what is, about measurement and reliability and the agreement of a data set to theory (or vice versa). We can establish a possible chain of events, but the fact that a chain of events is possible does not mean that it actually occurred. In the context most of the slashers use for science, they are not referring to things like metallurgy, chemistry or electronics, where science is used to predict materials strength, catalysis or part longevity, but to a very limited set of science related to origins research: phylogeny, paleo-archeology and sedimentary geology.
I doubt that even the foaming evo-trolls would claim that because a person is a creationist they cannot measure the strength of bolts used in a bridge. Rather, they are claiming such a person has no say in science related to origins, because they do not hold to evolutionary dogma.
The problem arises when evolutionary belief is used as a 'litmus test' A person can be a serious thinker, with much to add to a scientific field and still not agree with evolution. Since the most vocal opponents of a belief in evolution are Christians, there is a serious tinge of prejudicial discrimination based on religious viewpoint practiced throughout academia. Even if a person were conversant in evolution, with detailed knowledge of all current theory, practice, phylogeny and geology, that would not be enough to over-rule a belief in God.
-2 for a lack of thought on the topic at hand, Take another two and half off for offending people without a reason. Not everyone buys the American Dream baloney, particularly since the wipe out of '10 made renting for the last decade a wiser decision than the 3bd/2ba suburban track.
Slashdot Mirror
Using OO to develop a Turing-complete formal solution would require a Turing-complete description of the OO library you are working with, which would be a very surprising thing to find. The other possibility is that you are working on truly trivial software.
There is also in most of Theobald's argumentation an apparently conscious effort to confound the conclusion with the assumptions granted. If I start an argument asking you to grant 'A' How can I claim that later steps prove 'A'? logically I should not do such a thing. Theobald also neglects the terms of the debate by assuming that proof on one side represents a disproof on the other, when such is not the case. Many of his 'proofs' can just as easily prove ID.
I am particularly amused by the use of phylogeny as a proof, since phylogeny is the ultimate in the "Because I say so." type of argument. The simple truth is if you let me arrange the data in any order I want I can 'prove' just about anything, and phylogeny is just that, an artificial and fungible arrangement of the numbers.
Would you trust a used car salesman that told you 'similar cars get 50 miles per gallon' if you knew that by 'similar' he meant 'have four wheels'?
Camp's complaints are valid when considered from the stand point of logic. Theobald's rebuttals seem to me to miss the point.
Theobald's defense of his tautology in the face of Camp boiling out his subterfugenous statements also does not answer the complaint
By the way, I do not expect you to change your mind in this forum. What I do hope for is that you would be more critical in reading what evolutionist write, to see the points where the logic does not hold up. Thanks for the reference to Camp, I had not seen his critiques of Theobald. I will definitely read them and see if they hold up.
One more observation about the creation/evolution debate is about the tools available to the sides: Creationists eschew deception, because we answer to a God who commands truth. Evolutionists, on the other hand, will use any tool that gives them an 'evolutionary advantage'. I expect there to be a qualitative differences in the arguments from one side (bound by truth) and the other (what ever works for me.)
In your last paragraph you show exactly the thinking I was talking about.
What if a person has examined the claims of evolutionists and finds them, as I do, to contain flawed assumptions?
Does critical thinking about evolution now equate to 'a very clear lack of good scientific judgement' just because we find a science writer's assumptions, methods, analysis or conclusions flawed?
Science is more than just nodding your head up and down in agreement with a PhD. In my case I have examined much of the evidence for evolution and found it wanting. I guess it really comes down to how much original thinking you want your scientist to do. Being critical of the accepted dogma of evolution requires original thinking, and that might not be what you need, if all you need is to fill a slot and suck down funding from atheistic decision makers.
If you need original thinking, you might want to consider all candidates, even ones that disagree with evolution.
In this context design is a synonym with biologically advantageous patterns. Your hypothesis is that such can arise spontaneously. The entire science of food preservation is based on the opposite hypothesis. ID predicts that life arises from life. Louis Pasteur's great contribution to science was to develop an experiment that proved this hypothesis.
He did so in face of generally held belief of his day that life arose spontaneously.
Why should evolution get a pass on falsifiability under this same standard? It predicts that life is random in origin, ID predicts that life consists of an original designed order that may be subject to information loss over time, and hence degradation. Such degradation in life is easily proved, most of the fruit-fly mutation experiments show this clearly, and would (if they were allowed to continue past the photogenicly stunted stage that fruit-fly populations easily reestablish their original (non-mutated) populations once you stop messing with them.(put the mutants in with unmutated flies and in a few generations all you have is unmutated flies. Boring.
The bible goes further, and provides an eye-witness account that it was 'Good' The bible also describes an epoch in which life was corrupted (before the flood), the end of this corrupted life in the flood, and a world essentially identical to the one we can go out and touch today.
There is no way that any past event can be proved, using this standard. I examined your reference during the last evolution/ID debate on /. What I discovered was that each of the evidences as a support for evolution is dependent on assumptions that may or may not be true. In addition, you would need to rule out that the similarities of species is due to them being from the same design house. We would think nothing of finding the same dimension on the same part in two different engines made by the same manufacturer, we would assume they found something that worked and stuck with it. The differences, of course, are due to a difference in the designer's intent for the end state or use of the engine.
The point of this is that ID proponents are not non-thinking, rather they are non-conformist to evolutionary dogma. I prefer to make up my own mind, rather than simply swallowing what someone with an agenda says. Does that mean I do not have an agenda of my own? No, it simply means mine is different from Scientific American's agenda.
I will even share my insidious plan: to make people curious about the world around them, curious enough to question authority and find out for themselves what the bible says about creation, and what creation says about the bible. No Pope, no Darwin, but a willingness to find out who this God is and why he made me.
Let the trolling begin. I read every rant, just to see if someone finds a creative way of calling my intelligence into question. I consider every thoughtful argument, and ignore most ad hominum attacks
References?
It would be more correct to say that no amount of opinion will convince a creationist that they are wrong. Evidence is a different matter, and entirely lacking in this case.
One can not make the same observation of universal compatibility about evolution, because when we discover order in the universe it weakens evolution by making it less likely.
What ID proposes is a universe that contains design, and exhibits order as an original state, with disorder increasing from an original ordered state.
Thus, ID makes a prediction here: that there are ordered states that might be discovered with respect to complex systems such as life.
Why is that not a testable prediction? It seems to me that the drive to cure disease is infused with the idea that there is (or was in the past) a more desirable state than the one the victim is currently exhibiting. ID says that such a state does exist, and the Judeo-Christian God invites us to explore, and to find such hidden states.
Evolution requires a scientist to pursue his career at the expense of his soul, God invites a scientist to explore in the context of his soul, and promises that what is hidden can be found. Philosophically this allows me to abandon myself to my work (When that is appropriate) with the knowledge that God smiles on such an abandon, since he created me, this irresistible curiosity, and the capacity for abandoning myself into a problem.
My point was that evidence used to prove evolution do not falsify creation if the evidence can just as easily support ID. The truth is that science can not prove or disprove either idea of origins. What science can do is report on the structure of what exists today. ID predicts that everywhere we look we will find designed complexity devolving to chaos. Evolution predicts that we will find complexity evolving from chaos. Which idea fits better with your experience?
Quite right. The problem arises when the dogma is evolution, pretending to be science. It is preferable that the difficulties of any theory be exposed. Right now, ID proponents hold the role of Galileo to Sagan's Papacy.
Hmmm... What part of the ignorance do I address first? There are plenty of problems with using random mutation as a source of biodiversity, the primary problem being that information in DNA is stored in an error-correcting format, and by and large, mutation results in the death of the mutated organism. The other problem is that even when a mutation survives, it is grossly out numbered by unmutated examples of the species, which will tend to swamp the mutation in unmutated offspring. When normal mutation survival rates are applied to the stack of mutations required by the evolution, the time required for even a rather simple phylogenic branch takes well longer than the largest proposed age of the universe. Evolutionists resort to 'off stage' explanations, such as punctuated equilibrium to offset this problem. That places this back squarely in the realm of faith statements 'I'm sure it must have happened' without the benefit of science.
Because of the challenge that it represents to evolutionary dogma, such doubts must be censored by publications dedicated to the evolution idea, so I am not surprised that you are unaware of the problem. I rather imagine you are also unaware of the probability of the first cell arising by chance either.
I thought part of the scientific method was critical review. Why are you opposed to it?
Better would be to test on specifics of biology, such as the ATP cycle, the structure of DNA, the difference between Eucaryotic and Procaryotic cells and the biochemistry of glucose or similar subjects. Biology is a huge field. Origins is a microscopic field.
I'm guessing you haven't been to a frat party lately. Such juvenile humor is standard in some venues.
I disagree. ID predicts that where ever you look in life you will see design.
Really, what would be more useful than a speculation on eye evolution would be a precise definition of the biology of the eye, which does not require a scientist to hold any particular theory of origins. A evolution believer could claim to be researching the origins of the eye, the ID believer could claim to be researching the design of eye, either could make observations that benefit our understanding of the eye, and all of us would be better off. I think the Texas law is intended to allow the ID proponent to pursue such a career in the absence of prejudicial discrimination that has nothing to do with the work.
Science does not de-reference God, It shows what the design of something is. Proverbs 25:2 suggests that God takes delight in our finding out things we did not know. Such a finding does not make him less than he was, and the idea that you might someday find out all that things God has hidden is amazing. The more I find out about the universe the more I appreciate how little of it we actually know. A good example is the data streaming in from the Solar Dynamics Orbiter and the Stereo A/B satellites just now. We are finding out that we really do not know our own sun nearly as well as we thought. SDO could die today, and the data already taken would generate decades of writing.
Is such science dependent on a belief in evolution? I fail to see how.
ID et al calls evolution into question. They cannot both be true, hence the friction observable on this comment chain.
ID does not contradict science as the repeatable measurement of factual data, it calls into question assumptions used in the interpretation of that data WRT the origins question. Such debate is central to the scientific process, and ID proponents have as much right to speak to the interpretation of data as evolution proponents.
You could say that a process, unknown at this time, but subject to a set of laws and processes, was the source of the diversity that we see in life. The search for such a set of laws and processes could reveal much. Such a search does not endorse either evolution or intelligent design, it simply admits that we do not know everything about the universe.
Intron: the portion of DNA we do not understand yet. Punctuated equilibrium is simply ID by another name: "Thing remain the same until Something Unexplained comes in and causes species to diverge."
How do you date the layers? by the fossils present. How do you date the fossils? By the layer they are found in. (that is directly from my GEO 163 class.) Fossils of different layers found in a common layer can be explained as post deposit aggregations, or as surviving archaic populations, depending on the fad of the day. So, No, finding a fossil in the wrong layer will not falsify evolution.
To be fair about this you would have to say that evolution theory has tonnage of evidence for which the alternate theory has no explanation. This is not so. Most of the articles I have seen in ID-friendly journals deal with problems inherent in interpretations of data used to support evolution. Why is that not science? Your statement about theories of creationism having no evidence is incorrect. What would be far more studied on your part would be to understand what the debate is about, rather than making absolutist statements. Do you see how close your absolutism takes you to the point of religion statement?
A better explanation of intelligent design is that there is too much information present in life to be accounted for by random mutation over the age of the universe. The result of this observation is that the information must originate in an intelligence, since the only sources we see for the origination of information is an intelligence. Hence, what is observed with life is that there is a design present in life.
The inescapable next question is: Who? This inescapable question is what places this in the realm of religion.
There is an entirely different question that can be asked: Can science prove how life originated? The answer to this is no, it cannot. Science is about what is, about measurement and reliability and the agreement of a data set to theory (or vice versa). We can establish a possible chain of events, but the fact that a chain of events is possible does not mean that it actually occurred. In the context most of the slashers use for science, they are not referring to things like metallurgy, chemistry or electronics, where science is used to predict materials strength, catalysis or part longevity, but to a very limited set of science related to origins research: phylogeny, paleo-archeology and sedimentary geology.
I doubt that even the foaming evo-trolls would claim that because a person is a creationist they cannot measure the strength of bolts used in a bridge. Rather, they are claiming such a person has no say in science related to origins, because they do not hold to evolutionary dogma.
The problem arises when evolutionary belief is used as a 'litmus test' A person can be a serious thinker, with much to add to a scientific field and still not agree with evolution. Since the most vocal opponents of a belief in evolution are Christians, there is a serious tinge of prejudicial discrimination based on religious viewpoint practiced throughout academia. Even if a person were conversant in evolution, with detailed knowledge of all current theory, practice, phylogeny and geology, that would not be enough to over-rule a belief in God.
Wow. I have to admire the sheer opacity of this post. What is this about?
Would it not be more accurate to say "Your world view is different", since right and wrong are Judeo-Christian anachronisms?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_scale
Base 12? it sounds like a chipped propellor
-2 for a lack of thought on the topic at hand, Take another two and half off for offending people without a reason. Not everyone buys the American Dream baloney, particularly since the wipe out of '10 made renting for the last decade a wiser decision than the 3bd/2ba suburban track.