I do get what you are saying: I don't agree. You are using a class of argument I feel is logically groundless, and I don't think you are really appreciating why I find it to be so.
You have not distinguished zygotes from any other causal stage on the path to having a particular individual in a logically relevant way, and indeed are simply begging the question by classifying zygotes as a sort of being that can have an interest in whether or not it becomes a person. Zygotes cannot do this. They cannot value any particular outcome over any other, or regret not being people. They have, in short, no interests that are violated by their destruction, no more than any other cell in your body. It is thus perfectly illegitimate to speak of depriving them of anything in a moral sense.
If you want to convince people, you are going to have to deal forthrightly with that problem, instead of dancing around it. Zygotes are NOT YET the sorts of beings (like fetuses, babies, children, and adults all are) that we both agree DO have moral interests. Whether you like it or not, that still leaves them in the same MORAL class as ANYTHING on the path of causality to the individual. Yes, by killing a zygote, you are making it less likely that it will develop into an individual (though you still fail to acknowledge that a zygote is just as insufficient to make a fetus as is a single sperm: it also requires implantation). But that is sneakily considering the interests of an being that does not yet exist, and pretending that they are the zygote's interests. That's a no go. And unless you can provide some account as to why a _zygote_ has interests, your argument really IS substantively no different than arguing that not impregnating a woman is wrong. It's foisting the interests of an imagined future being onto something that does not have such interests.
It's a somewhat philosophical and completely secular way to think about it.
It may be those things, but it's also known as the genetic fallacy: trying to bring the past history of something (was it intended, was it an act of nature) into a discussion of what it now IS, and what rights it might have. Whether something's cause was intentional or not makes no difference as to whether its life or death is of moral concern!
The guilt of that action (potential deprivation of life) is on those who had a part in it.
Again, the only existing thing that is being deprived of life is the ZYGOTE. Unless you can explain why the zygote has more interests in being alive (or developing into a person) than an egg does in being impregnated, or a pig does in not being slaughtered, you're still positing imaginary interests for beings that do not yet exist. If you are going to make this argument, you have to find some sort of valid justification that doesn't ascribe interests to beings that don't have any in the first place.
The fact that it could become multiple identical offspring reinforces what I have been saying more than anything...maybe that zygote you aborted actually deprived 4 people of lives they would have had.
You're talking about potential people here, yet again. I've said before: I just don't think that's a valid rationale for considering whether zygotes are of moral concern. By that rationale, you deprive people of life just by not having as many kids as you can all the time, in exactly the same way. The existence of a zygote may serve to help you envision a potential individual, but it itself is still potential: as much as sperm and eggs are potential. It is simply not yet a being. You can talk about those future beings all you want, but the fact is that it's incoherent to talk about something and its interests before it even exists. That a single zygote could be divided again and again into more and more people AFTER the time they are discussing killing it serves to drive home the point that cannot possibly be an "individual" at this point. It's certainly a necessary component for an individual, but not yet sufficient to be one.
You also seem to talk a lot about "fate." To put it bluntly, that's simply a matter of faith, as much as souls are. Morality is about deciding what is an is not permissible: if you think everything is naturally "fated" to be, and human interference is wrong, then we might as well not discuss morality at all.
A sperm is not a person and has no chance on it's own of becoming a person. At best it COULD go on one day to contribute half of the genetic material to make a person. As it stand, a sperm has zero potential.
I don't see how you've extricated yourself from my charge of arbitrariness. Indeed, you've just brought up naturalistic fate again: your key claimed difference is that zygotes naturally develop. But the CAUSE of something is not of moral concern when we're trying to decide its moral status as a being. That one action (sex leading to egg + sperm) was chosen, and one was relatively automatic (implantation: though it's still a LESS than 50% occurance) doesn't change what the thing in question IS. Each thing is still a step on the way to something else, but it's not that something else yet.
They might have cost someone their life...that should not be taken lightly
Again, you're speaking as if a being existed, a specific someone, that does not yet exist. What exists is a few cells with chemical sequence that could just as easily exist on a hard disk as a series of ones and zeros. If you know anything about genetics, you know that that sequence is NOT even a blueprint for a person: it's a recipe for how to go about BUILDING a particular person.
It consists of the genetic material of a mother and father...and is genetically unique from both, and any other living person.We've already covered that though. It's NOT necessarily unique, and uniqueness is NOT a valid reason for having moral concern for something. Whether or not you are unique from any other living person, it's STILL wrong to kill you.
It's alot like shooting a rifle into the air in a crowded area and hoping no one got killed when the bullet lands.
To say that the situation is the same is simply to beg the question. The entire force of that comparison comes from simply ASSUMING that the zygote is a being for whom we should have moral concern: the very question we are contending over!
Life experiences and nutrition have nothing to do with this...the fact is, is that if you have a fertilized egg that is trying to grow into a human being, and you destroy it, you've possibly destroyed a human being.
They have everything to do with it, ESPECIALLY if we buy your argument about potential _particular_ people. At best, a single zygote is potentially MILLIONS of different possible people. But it still ISN'T the sort of being we think of when we think of an individual. Not yet. And so it makes no sense to speak of it as if it was.
This is a bad strawman argument. No...you cannot lock someone in jail because they could potentially kill someone. Of course you can't (or at least shouldn't). However I suppose it is ok to pull the trigger on a potentially loaded weapon at someone(s) who isn't/aren't developed enough for our liking at the time. Yes...this is somewhat of a strawman itself, but IMHO, alot less so than the one I was given.
If that's really a straw man, you haven't bothered to explain why. It does exactly the same thing you are doing: treating a being NOW in a way that only makes sense in light of one particular way it MIGHT be in the future. Your example IS a straw man, and indeed begs the question yet again, because you are speaking about a "who" when none of the things that make people "whos" are present.
How would you define 'interests' that this fetus must have? Someone in certain type of coma is not concious and likely doesn't express any interests...but we can't simply do whatever the heck we want with them...at least not as casually.
Pretty simply, we define something's interests by the capabilities it has or has had. Fetuses, to greater or lesser degrees, can feel pain. That's a moral capacity right there. And people once able to think about themselves, can certainly percieve the future, and have all sorts of expectations for their lives, even what might happen if they were in a coma. But zygotes do not have the capacity to have interests for the future: and hence killing them doesn't deprive THEM of anything. You can envision an imaginary person that the zygote represents to you all you want, the fact is is that that person doesn't currently exist. You can bring it into existence or not, but until it's actually in existence or not, the chioce is no different from simply deciding whether to have a child or not (I can envision an imaginary future person just as easily before conception as afterwards!)
A zygote might too, but people dismiss it because they don't have to look at it, and it's very convienient.
But a zygote never had interests prior to the decision about whether to kill it in the first place. How can it possibly have expectations for the future? How can it have interests for itself? How can you speak of it as if it were a person "waking up" from a coma when it was never awake prior: indeed when it lacks any and all of the basic machinery necessary to even "wake" or "sleep" in the first place?
---When it splits to form twins, then they are no longer unique due to each others existance, but they are unique from their parents...they are human lives starting and progressing, if allowed to take their natural course.---
I think you've missed the problem. The problem is that you just asserted that a zygote is a unique human being. But it's not necessarily: it could split off into two beings. Or three. None of them genetically unique. Whatever your evasions later, that invalidates your earlier criteria. Put simply, uniqueness of genetic code alone (which is what we were talking about before: remember the whole point of this digression, in the context of you claiming that zygotes are special because they are genetically unique?) is NOT a condition for something to have rights. If it were then twins wouldn't have rights.
---No...it isn't. Sperm has no potential for life on it's own...neither does an egg - alone. A sperm isn't going to be delivered and need to be fed.---
A zygote has no potential either: in fact if it doesn't implant in the uterine wall, it won't develop into a fetus at all. Your criteria for "potential" is thus arbitrary: you are denying potential because of additional steps necessary in one case: utterly ignoring the prescence of additional steps in the other case.
---An embryo will be someone...it might be the next great mind like Einstein and Stephen Hawking, or it might be a worthless first post troll, but it will be someone.---
If put into an egg, a sperm will be someone too. Same difference. Indeed, the "someone" we think of when we think of particular someones is only _marginally_ due to the genetic code: life's experiences, nutritional intake, and a whole host of other things make just as much of a difference.
---It's easy to try to think so little of it because we don't have to look at it...but the situation is what it is.---
But I HAVE thought about it a great great deal. You can't grant moral rights to a being that has no interests to begin with based simply on future possibilities anymore than you can lock someone in jail just because they have a "potential" to be a murderer. Nor can any genetical fallacy of natural inevitability help.
---My point is that that term should apply to all human lifeforms, irregardless of developmental status. By viewing the meaning of the word "person" differently that I do, we cannot come to a middle ground on the issue.---
Uh no, that's utterly insane. Words are simply a coordination game: they are what we use to express different concepts. In this case, the word "person" has many meanings. I used one. You want to use the other, because you are under the mistaken impression that doing so makes your point for you. And I'm happy to use any meaning you want to use. What I'm not happy to do is allow you to equivocate: to use the connotation of one meaning of the word as a legitimate connotation of another meaning.
---You said that you didn't hear any arguments that were less flimsy than ones about "future persons," and I said that there's no such thing as "future persons." They're persons already.---
Look "person" is a word that has several meanings. However, my particular use of the term "future person" was not an attempt to decide any substantive issue. I don't rule out zygotes from moral consideration simply because they are or are not persons under any particular definition. I was discussing the fact that they are not persons in the legal and psychological sense of the term (and indeed, my usage is much more standard than yours). Your use of YOUR term, however, IS an attempt to use semantics alone to decide a substantive issue. That's flatly illegitimate as a tactic of argumentation.
---Whereas my values are based on a broader acceptance of humanity in general. I don't just value people I know and can talk to.---
But on what grounds do you value zygotes? So far you've only said that you do based purely on definitional criteria: whether or not you define zygotes as part of "humanity in general." It doesn't matter whether they are or they are not: the question remains: why value the life of a zygote/embryo the same as? "They are both persons" is not any sort of coherent answer, despite being true for one definition of the word.
---It's because I don't limit myself to valuing those I deal with everyday. I don't value a person based on their ability to interact with others or feel and experience the same things I do.---
So do you grant rights to rocks then? Obviously not. WHY? If your answer is "because they aren't human" then you haven't answered the question. That WOULD be precisely wat you are falsely accusing me of: that is, letting semantics do the work of an argument for you. Regardless of whether or not zygotes and, say, even fetuses, fall into the category of "human" you can't simply act as if they were the same thing, and that their differences are irrelevant to their moral stature. None of the traditional justifications for giving beings moral stature even makes sense in the case of zygotes. If you have some NEW justifications that help add new insight, be my guest, but argument from definition isn't going to fly.
---Furthermore, saying that your use of the word person is the "legal" definition isn't a strong argument.---
For goodness sakes, it's not an argument at all! Words are tools of SEMANTIC USAGE. They DO NOT decide substantive issues. All that's important is that when two people are using a word, they both know what the other means. As I've said a million times over, if you're too dense to understand the distinction between semantic and substance, I'm happy to accomodate you by using your definition, or whatever defintion you please. I only ask that you not try to pull a fast one by pretending that the underlying concept is the same.
---As such, I see no reason to deny the unborn basic human rights. Perhaps you should justify why rights should be denied instead of asking me to justify why they should be granted other than that you don't feel a connection to them.---
It has nothing at all to do with simply lacking a "connection" to them: they lack all the basic elements that are required for any being to have interests in the first place! I guess it comes down to sheer incredulity: on what possible grounds can they be accorded moral concern?
---Is whether or not an adult that is murdered felt pain fundamentally relevant to whether or not the action was wrong?---
Yes. Though you'll note I didn't say that it was exclusive, and this is really a side issue (though you appear not to have noticed). Other things, like the fact that adults have interests in being alive, are also relevant.
---Capacity to feel pain is irrelevant to the debate of whether or not ending their life is all right.---
It certainly makes a difference when faced with choices for instance: faced with one person's painful death and another's death without pain. And it certainly matters when we're talking about beings who do NOT have the capacities that make us care about the ending of their lives: it's still wrong to cause them pain, or kill them painfully. A chicken can't anticipate the future or understand not living, but it can still feel pain, and few people would agree that it's morally neutral to cause it pain all other things equal.
---Language is important. The definitions you use are means of classifying objects in your surroundings into one category or another and how you treat it.---
Only by the sloppy. The problem is not what definitions you use, but when you change definitions without fully appreciating the affect on its connotations and related concepts. For instance, you want to stop using a more legal definition of "person" that I've used, which is fine by me. However, you also want to sneak in all the connotations and moral arguments attached to that word into your new word. And that's NOT acceptable.
---By using the term "future person," you quite succinctly deny that the embryo is a person and that it should be accorded the same rights as a person.---
If anyone is guilty of using Orwellian language here, it's you. My use of the word person is pretty darn clear: I'm talking about the class of beings for which we have a developed account of moral rights and legal obligations. This is what the law talks about when it talks about persons. You want, simply by equivocation on the broader meaning of "person," to extend those rights to cells MERELY by using a different definition: without actually making any sort of new case for why the rights and moral considerations of people should be extended to zygotes. You're the one trying to escape argument merely by re-arranging semantics.
---Similarly, people around the turn of the century distinguished between "Americans" and "immigrants" to justify discrimination against them regardless of their actual citizenship status.---
But in this case it doesn't matter what you CALLED them: what matters is that these people had every right to be treated the same, regardless of how they were labeled. Your sentiment is much closer to those people who used language to define away people's rights, in that you want to make rights purely and issue of definition, rather than a discussion of actual moral obligations, actual capacities, and so forth.
---As in my original post, I clarified that if you value human life beyond those that you immediately care for, then the arbitrary distinctions between human and not human in the abortion/fetal stem cell debate should be objectionable.---
What's objectionable is your failure to understand the distinction between definitions (which express concepts) and the concepts they express. You are refusing to acknowledge that when you switch definitions, you've also switched concepts. I, and most moral philosophers, are talking about certain things when we talk about value for "human life." We do that because we've had to THINK of particular things, and we've had to build our arguments on the characteristics of those particular things. My own values why it's wrong to kill other people is based on my experience with them, and my empathy for them, not as definitions, but as actual beings with certain characteristics. Stem cells simply don't fit into that category of things: they have none of the characteristics that are relevant to my value. If you are going to argue that they should have moral consideration, then you are going to have to make a case as to _why_ they should that doesn't simply rely on an arbitrary choice of semantics.
To explain it one last time, you've made the error of applying your value for human life directly to the _definition_ of human life, not to what is actually concieved of when most people speak of human life being of moral consideration for various reasons having to do with people's capacity to have feelings, relationships, interests, expectations, obligaitons, etc. (which zygotes can't have, in any way shape or form). You can define "person" however you wish: that doesn't remove from you the burden of explaining why zygotes/embryos should have the same rights as do the people we deal with everyday.
---It's a genetically unique individual that is forming...yes...a genetically unique individual can be deprived of something.---
Twins are not genetically unique. Is it okay to kill the spare? No. The uniqueness of genetic code is simply not a criteria on which to derive rights. One could mangle with the DNA in any cell and end up with something "unique"... but so what? Or rearrange the letters on a computer printout of the sequenced code. It's still just a cell with information coded into it. It's still just a computer disk with information coded onto it. That information can be used to build a being that has interests, or it cannot be. But cells don't have interests.
---If you set the wheels into motion to create a new being, fertilizing an egg and mixing genes, then there is something there that you can take away from.---
I agree: but what you are taking the life of is a few cells. It's you who is arguing that we should give rights and moral consideration to these cells in lieu of their POTENTIAL. But that's just as silly as giving rights to sperm because of its potential. Whether the wheels are in motion or not (and utterly subjective understanding: I could just as easily argue that by creating you, and giving you a drive to reproduce, we are settingt the wheels in motion for you to impregnate whatever you can), potential is not actuality, and by your own argument, actuality is what's relevant.
---True, they don't have nervous systems yet, but a newborn isn't an intelligent being yet either. Feeling pain is also irrelvent to whether or not its right to kill someone---
I disagree: it's very much relevant (though not exclusive).
---Left to its own devices, an embryo will grow into a child and then an adult.---
No, as has been pointed out. It requires a whole host of special infusions, environments, and so forth. But even that is beside the point: the thing in question is still just undifferentied cells. Regardless of what it could potentially be, why is detroying IT wrong? Where's the argument here, based on what the embryo actually is?
---Begging the question of "future beings" or "potential people" denies that they already are a person -- just an undeveloped one.---
Now you're just playing fast and loose with language. I don't much mind if you want to define "person" in such a way that even the embryo is one (definitions don't determine the truth of anything). But if that's the case then you have to start over with the justification as why it is wrong to kill all people. Because the previous justifications (the ones I and most people accept) are premised on a quite different definition: and you can't make a moral argument simply by choosing definitions.
---These cells die naturally without human malice.---
Eh? They certainly could be killed with human malice: but it's still not wrong to kill them.
---Since they cannot become other people anyway, their deaths are irrelevant.---
Why does that matter? What if they could become other people with slight alterations that activate their codes in the right way? How is that different from the way the uterine lining chemically triggers embryos to develop into fetuses?
---No...I am not. There's not a life there to deprive. You can't deprive someone of life when their very beginnings have never happened....you CAN deprive someone of life when you set the beginnings of their exitance into motion and then suddenly take it away.---
Sorry, but that just runs into the second half of the prong: you're just begging the question by assuming that a zygote is already something of moral concern: a "someone" that can be deprived of something.
---Deprive means "To take away"....you can't take something away from something that does not yet exist.---
My point exactly. But in this case, all you are depriving of life is a cell. The "someone" does not yet exist.
Since "atheist" has been co-opted by religious and agnostics seeking to obfuscate that binary problem, some have suggested using "non-theist" to make things clearer. Sure, atheist MEANS without god belief, and most atheists use it that way, but the connotations are sometimes just too ingrained to bother challenging.
It's still wrong to dismiss entire viewpoints so quickly and sumarily, without addressing them. It's certainly no good to do so by lumping everyone into the same bucket and then tossing it out the window.
---Yes...indoctrinated.---
Obviously, you have a very low opinion of most people's ability to think and question. I never accuse religious believers of believing because they are indoctrinated: and I don't see such a claim as legitimate in this arena either. Certianly, some people are, but simply blanket writing off people's views as indoctrination is pre-emptive Orwellian hand-waving. There are many other reasons for why one view might dominate in certain places than simply a Foucaultian (and, ironically, very lefist!) reference to pure "power."
---Anyplace you see aggression and conflict at the hands of communists you can pretty much define it as a war in the name of 'no God.' The reason is that communism has no deities, only saints and martyrs.---
That makes about as much sense as calling them "wars in the name of no Star Trek" since Mao didn't watch American Sci-Fi. There have certainly been people who didn't believe in god persecuting those who did for their beliefs. But simply not believing in a god is no reason to talk about doing something in the name of no god. I don't brush my teeth "in the name of no god."
---Reguardless of how people feel about whether or not abortion should be allowed, make no illusions about it - you are depriving a human being of life.---
It's more complicated than that. By your understanding, you are depriving a human being of life by not impregnating every woman you meet. The question is when we should grant rights and give moral consideration to something, based on what capacities it has. If you want to extend those to potential capacities, given what you claim is a "normal" course of events (meaning, not anywhere near certain, but what you think should happen, which is already inserting a judgement before justifying it), then you're either stuck with the problem that lots of things are potential other things, and nowhere backwards in a chain of events does that stop, or you've begged the question by deciding that a zygote is something that already matters.
We don't, for instance, give kids a liscence to drive just because if they follow their "normal" course they will one day be responsible enough to drive a car.
If you're referring to the September 11 teaching plans, then I should remind you that those allegations turned out to be utter bullshit. The NEA's site was filled with references to Bush's speeches, CIA factbooks, blamed Al Queda directly, and so on. The "scandelous" quotes came from one off-site link out of hundreds, and it turned out to be talking about not blaming all Muslims: the essay BEGAN by blaming the terrorists.
---It was, if I remember correctly, more like absolute truth and accountability... but I may not have my facts totally straight.---
Sounds like you have no intention of getting your facts straight.
The problem is, stem cells aren't anything like what one thinks about when they think about fetuses. While a reasonable argument can be made against abortion after fetuses have developed past a certain stage, stem cells are nowhere near that stage. They don't even have nervous systems: they are just individual, undifferentied cells. They are chemically nearly indentical from other cells in the human body that will kill em mass all the time without moral quandry (like skin cells, or brain cells). Indeed, I've never heard a reasonable moral response to this that didn't involve positing ad hoc things like souls (which, hell, I could posit just as easily for cars, making scrap yards immoral) or imagining future beings: in short not dealing with the specific thing being considered, whether it has or ever has had any interests.
---It would be hard to argue that a newborn is sentient.---
Are YOU sentient? Can't you see how ridiculous this example is: comparing the sentience of a new born to something that doesn't even have a NERVOUS SYSTEM? While I think the parent goes overboard in his definition of sentience, you go overboard in the opposite direction.
---That said, when you do what they are doing at Stanford you create life that has the potential for sentience---
A pile dog crap has the potential for sentience: a mother eats it, digests it, and the nutrients become part of the baby she's growing inside her. Same difference. It's _existing_ sentience that's the problem, not potential. Everything all the way back to the beginning of time might as well be potential.
---To say that if you keep reducing a set with a recursive algorithm will neccassarily reduce the set to a single item requires certain conditions on the elements in the set.---
Conditions I already stated... look it's not THAT hard to work this one out with a piece of paper, or in Excel.
---An MEve will only show up when an entire species is reduced to a very small population size and then manages to recover and survive.---
NO. MEve is NOT an individual who, during the time she lived, had to be the only one (or one of a very few, to bear offspring into the next generation. What she is, is a common maternal ancestor of everyone alive today (i.e. go back in your family tree via maternal lines, and at some point you'll find the same individual) Very different thing.
---But for there to be an MEve for mankind there had to at some point be a very small number of woman who where successfully passing on their genes.---
Again, not at all. The alternate, uncontaminated, maternal lineages die out over many many generations: and this need have nothing at all to do with anything concerning the time MEve lived. Remember, it's not that the entire population, taken as a whole in EACH generation, that contracts back to MEve. Rather, the particular set of people alive today all has MEve as a common maternal ancestor. That's a very different beast, and I don't think you grasp it yet. Try modeling it first.
Don't entire ecosystems thrive on deep sea bacteria? I remember that Blue Planet Discovery Special had shots of both the "hot vent" ecosystem and the "deep seeps" ecosystem. The vents had tubeworms, weird lobsters, and fish. The seeps had tubeworms, muscles, and crabs. The only drawback is that I'm sure all these creatures require the crazy pressures of those depths to survive.
---However, comparing evolution to coin tossing would be like someone that tossed the coin a few billion or more times and had it come up heads every time.---
Not at all. How can you criticize evolution as implausible when you don't even have a basic understanding of what it is? Evolution is not a series of lucky accidents that miraculously happen "just so" to produce us. That's thinking deliberately backwards through a process that worked undeterminativly forwards. It is not a game of chance, but rather a selective process with no PARTICULAR end pre-specified.
The point of my coin example is not to analougize how evolution works, but to explain why some outcomes that seem miraculous are actually inevitable and necessary: and why it's understandable that people get them confused.
Another example: say you close your eyes, and throw a dart at a target on a huge wall. You open your eyes to find that you got a bullseye. The chances against this are phenomenal, indeed. However, that is NOT what's going on with how you're thinking about evolution. What is going on is that you are throwing the dart blind, as before, at a completely blank wall, and then, after it's stuck in the wall at a random point, drawing a target around it in such a way that the dart is in the center of the bullseye! That is, for us to speak of a "probability against" at all, we need to specify the event BEFORE it takes place, not afterwards. The chances of the dart hitting a target are very small when the target was drawn before the throw: the chances of it hitting ANY random spot on the wall, however, are 100%, regardless of how special we come to think of that particular spot as being afterwards.
Now, that's a primer on probability. We still haven't gotten into what's going on with evolution. If you are going to attack evolution, then you at least need to describe it correctly: not as a series of lucky accidents, but rather as a whole bunch of totally random accidents, most of which are neither lucky nor unlucky from ANY hindsight of a particular goal. Of these, only a few are selected according to their adaptability, and then they propogate. Random chance is certainly involved, but the process can just as well rely upon it being TOTALY random: no random event needs to be "just so" for the process to work. That's because the actual "process" is the _selection_ of particular dice throws according to some environmental pressure criteria, not the throwing of the dice.
Now, maybe you were just confused: instead of evolution, you meant abiogenesis. That's a very different story, because "evolution" only takes place when there is fidelistic reproduction. Abiogenesis, on the other hand, WOULD require more chance. However, it STILL isn't so simple as a bunch of lucky coin flips. People doing abiogenesis, just like people doing evolution, aren't looking for a series of lucky chances. Instead, they are looking for natural processes that could have been involved with the production of life. If it were all about an airplane coming together in a whirlwind, there would be nothing to study, and it would indeed be implausible. But that's not what it's about. A simple example of more what it IS about that you can try at home: consider the chaotic mixture of a glass of salt stirred together (use a spoon) with lots of black peppercorns. Now, swirl or shake the glass gently. What happens? The peppercorns almost all float to the top: when you add chaotic motion to a chaotic arrangement, you get a form of sorted order! Now, think about the various ways we could characterize what happened. We COULD say that the event is miraculous, because if you work out the chances of all the peppercorns ending up on top of the salt just by random chance, it is infintesimally small. But in fact, far from nearly impossible, the event is almost _inevitable_: it happens every time. So the simple probability calculation is wrong somehow: it's not correctly characterizing what's actually happening. And what's wrong is that there is a _process_ at work here: when the glass shakes and things have freedom to move around chaotically, gravity is sorting the items by density: in a sense they are ratcheting things upwards. When a peppercorn randomly moves up in the salt, the smaller salt grains fall and fill in underneath it more quickly than the pepper corn can move. Random movements of peppercorns downwards are blocked: random movements upwards are easy. So up is how it travels in the long run. So, here we have our example of how total chaos, when in a particular situation, can actually build order. People doing abiogenesis are looking for processes like this: things that DRIVE the formation of simple molecules, and continue to drive them in a certain direction. That's a VERY different thing from simply waiting around for totally random combinations to happen.
---I fail to see how everything can be explained with no high power involved.---
I don't know what you mean by "high(er?) power." Higher than what, along what scale? The bigger problem is, if you can't explain what your pet theory of a particular higher power is, or how it works, it's no better than no explanation at all. It's like saying "I fail to see how everything can be explained without the involvement of sdfasdfkueifdfdsae." Well, what does the involvement of sdfasdfkueifdfdsae involve, exactly? What is it? How does it work? Either you can answer those questions or you can't: and if you can't you're stuck back at square one with the rest of us.
---I honestly don't understand what atheists believe in this area. Nobody has ever been able to tell me what is outside of space and time.---
It's even worse than that: we don't even know if "outside" is a word that makes any sense to apply to "space" or "time" (the same way "blue" doesn't really make much sense when applied to "justice"). But the fact that no one has any idea about how to even think about these questions doesn't make "God!" the default best answer. "God" just adds and even BIGGER mystery that we ALSO can't explain to the mix, without even doing much of anything to explain what happened (since we can't understand God in the first place).
---Amazing that all those accidents of nature worked out just perfectly, isn't it?---
No, because they didn't. Imagine a coin flipping contest with tiers and thousands of contestants. After several rounds, you'll have a person who has won six or seven coin tosses in a row. Miraculous? Amazing? No: necessarily inevitable.
---I think that is even more unbelievable than Creation.---
Only in the sense that an actual attempt at explanation takes more thought to consider than a complete LACK of any explanation!
Even specifying "the Christian God" isn't anywhere near specific enough. One needs to describe a being in enough theological detail to actually relate it to the world in a concrete and operational way so that we can consider what claims might need to be verified.
Yes, and total entropy in the universe is indeed increasing. That doesn't preclude entropy from decreasing in various places within the universe. If what you were saying were true, the 2nd law woul preclude the formation of molecules: they're higher order structures, after all. It would preclude nuclear fusion that drives stars, and so on. The 2nd law is NOT the idea that simple structures can never get more complex as time goes forward. It is, rather, simply the idea that no reaction is efficient: if you want change, it's going to cost you in lost energy.
---Life happened (somewhere at some time),---
Uh, life is happening now, and according to your take on the 2nd law, it's defying physics. In reality, it's acting completely in accordance with physics: chemical reactions increase order, but at the cost of tons and tons of wasted energy.
---so it must have happened spontaneously or else the entropy of the universe would have decreased and thus violated the second law.---
Eh? What do you mean by "spontaneously"? When you eat food, and it's broken down, and turned into energy, this process is not spontaneous. But, as the second law predicts, it is very far from perfectly efficient: you lose lots of energy to heat loss in the process.
---The second point I was trying to make was that "creation" theory does not necessarily require 100% compliance with the English translation of old Hebrew religious documents.---
Indeed, it doesn't require compliance with ANY story. But it matters what stories are plausible and testable. It also matters that any creations that require "whos" then simlpy require explanation for the origin of the "whos."
Slashdot Mirror
I do get what you are saying: I don't agree. You are using a class of argument I feel is logically groundless, and I don't think you are really appreciating why I find it to be so.
You have not distinguished zygotes from any other causal stage on the path to having a particular individual in a logically relevant way, and indeed are simply begging the question by classifying zygotes as a sort of being that can have an interest in whether or not it becomes a person.
Zygotes cannot do this. They cannot value any particular outcome over any other, or regret not being people. They have, in short, no interests that are violated by their destruction, no more than any other cell in your body. It is thus perfectly illegitimate to speak of depriving them of anything in a moral sense.
If you want to convince people, you are going to have to deal forthrightly with that problem, instead of dancing around it. Zygotes are NOT YET the sorts of beings (like fetuses, babies, children, and adults all are) that we both agree DO have moral interests. Whether you like it or not, that still leaves them in the same MORAL class as ANYTHING on the path of causality to the individual. Yes, by killing a zygote, you are making it less likely that it will develop into an individual (though you still fail to acknowledge that a zygote is just as insufficient to make a fetus as is a single sperm: it also requires implantation). But that is sneakily considering the interests of an being that does not yet exist, and pretending that they are the zygote's interests. That's a no go. And unless you can provide some account as to why a _zygote_ has interests, your argument really IS substantively no different than arguing that not impregnating a woman is wrong. It's foisting the interests of an imagined future being onto something that does not have such interests.
It's a somewhat philosophical and completely secular way to think about it.
It may be those things, but it's also known as the genetic fallacy: trying to bring the past history of something (was it intended, was it an act of nature) into a discussion of what it now IS, and what rights it might have. Whether something's cause was intentional or not makes no difference as to whether its life or death is of moral concern!
The guilt of that action (potential deprivation of life) is on those who had a part in it.
Again, the only existing thing that is being deprived of life is the ZYGOTE. Unless you can explain why the zygote has more interests in being alive (or developing into a person) than an egg does in being impregnated, or a pig does in not being slaughtered, you're still positing imaginary interests for beings that do not yet exist. If you are going to make this argument, you have to find some sort of valid justification that doesn't ascribe interests to beings that don't have any in the first place.
The fact that it could become multiple identical offspring reinforces what I have been saying more than anything...maybe that zygote you aborted actually deprived 4 people of lives they would have had.
You're talking about potential people here, yet again. I've said before: I just don't think that's a valid rationale for considering whether zygotes are of moral concern. By that rationale, you deprive people of life just by not having as many kids as you can all the time, in exactly the same way. The existence of a zygote may serve to help you envision a potential individual, but it itself is still potential: as much as sperm and eggs are potential. It is simply not yet a being. You can talk about those future beings all you want, but the fact is that it's incoherent to talk about something and its interests before it even exists.
That a single zygote could be divided again and again into more and more people AFTER the time they are discussing killing it serves to drive home the point that cannot possibly be an "individual" at this point. It's certainly a necessary component for an individual, but not yet sufficient to be one.
You also seem to talk a lot about "fate." To put it bluntly, that's simply a matter of faith, as much as souls are. Morality is about deciding what is an is not permissible: if you think everything is naturally "fated" to be, and human interference is wrong, then we might as well not discuss morality at all.
A sperm is not a person and has no chance on it's own of becoming a person. At best it COULD go on one day to contribute half of the genetic material to make a person. As it stand, a sperm has zero potential.
I don't see how you've extricated yourself from my charge of arbitrariness. Indeed, you've just brought up naturalistic fate again: your key claimed difference is that zygotes naturally develop. But the CAUSE of something is not of moral concern when we're trying to decide its moral status as a being. That one action (sex leading to egg + sperm) was chosen, and one was relatively automatic (implantation: though it's still a LESS than 50% occurance) doesn't change what the thing in question IS. Each thing is still a step on the way to something else, but it's not that something else yet.
They might have cost someone their life...that should not be taken lightly
Again, you're speaking as if a being existed, a specific someone, that does not yet exist. What exists is a few cells with chemical sequence that could just as easily exist on a hard disk as a series of ones and zeros. If you know anything about genetics, you know that that sequence is NOT even a blueprint for a person: it's a recipe for how to go about BUILDING a particular person.
It consists of the genetic material of a mother and father...and is genetically unique from both, and any other living person.We've already covered that though. It's NOT necessarily unique, and uniqueness is NOT a valid reason for having moral concern for something. Whether or not you are unique from any other living person, it's STILL wrong to kill you.
It's alot like shooting a rifle into the air in a crowded area and hoping no one got killed when the bullet lands.
To say that the situation is the same is simply to beg the question. The entire force of that comparison comes from simply ASSUMING that the zygote is a being for whom we should have moral concern: the very question we are contending over!
Life experiences and nutrition have nothing to do with this...the fact is, is that if you have a fertilized egg that is trying to grow into a human being, and you destroy it, you've possibly destroyed a human being.
They have everything to do with it, ESPECIALLY if we buy your argument about potential _particular_ people. At best, a single zygote is potentially MILLIONS of different possible people. But it still ISN'T the sort of being we think of when we think of an individual. Not yet. And so it makes no sense to speak of it as if it was.
This is a bad strawman argument. No...you cannot lock someone in jail because they could potentially kill someone. Of course you can't (or at least shouldn't). However I suppose it is ok to pull the trigger on a potentially loaded weapon at someone(s) who isn't/aren't developed enough for our liking at the time. Yes...this is somewhat of a strawman itself, but IMHO, alot less so than the one I was given.
If that's really a straw man, you haven't bothered to explain why. It does exactly the same thing you are doing: treating a being NOW in a way that only makes sense in light of one particular way it MIGHT be in the future. Your example IS a straw man, and indeed begs the question yet again, because you are speaking about a "who" when none of the things that make people "whos" are present.
How would you define 'interests' that this fetus must have? Someone in certain type of coma is not concious and likely doesn't express any interests...but we can't simply do whatever the heck we want with them...at least not as casually.
Pretty simply, we define something's interests by the capabilities it has or has had. Fetuses, to greater or lesser degrees, can feel pain. That's a moral capacity right there. And people once able to think about themselves, can certainly percieve the future, and have all sorts of expectations for their lives, even what might happen if they were in a coma. But zygotes do not have the capacity to have interests for the future: and hence killing them doesn't deprive THEM of anything. You can envision an imaginary person that the zygote represents to you all you want, the fact is is that that person doesn't currently exist. You can bring it into existence or not, but until it's actually in existence or not, the chioce is no different from simply deciding whether to have a child or not (I can envision an imaginary future person just as easily before conception as afterwards!)
A zygote might too, but people dismiss it because they don't have to look at it, and it's very convienient.
But a zygote never had interests prior to the decision about whether to kill it in the first place. How can it possibly have expectations for the future? How can it have interests for itself? How can you speak of it as if it were a person "waking up" from a coma when it was never awake prior: indeed when it lacks any and all of the basic machinery necessary to even "wake" or "sleep" in the first place?
---When it splits to form twins, then they are no longer unique due to each others existance, but they are unique from their parents...they are human lives starting and progressing, if allowed to take their natural course.---
I think you've missed the problem. The problem is that you just asserted that a zygote is a unique human being. But it's not necessarily: it could split off into two beings. Or three. None of them genetically unique. Whatever your evasions later, that invalidates your earlier criteria. Put simply, uniqueness of genetic code alone (which is what we were talking about before: remember the whole point of this digression, in the context of you claiming that zygotes are special because they are genetically unique?) is NOT a condition for something to have rights. If it were then twins wouldn't have rights.
---No...it isn't. Sperm has no potential for life on it's own...neither does an egg - alone. A sperm isn't going to be delivered and need to be fed.---
A zygote has no potential either: in fact if it doesn't implant in the uterine wall, it won't develop into a fetus at all. Your criteria for "potential" is thus arbitrary: you are denying potential because of additional steps necessary in one case: utterly ignoring the prescence of additional steps in the other case.
---An embryo will be someone...it might be the next great mind like Einstein and Stephen Hawking, or it might be a worthless first post troll, but it will be someone.---
If put into an egg, a sperm will be someone too. Same difference. Indeed, the "someone" we think of when we think of particular someones is only _marginally_ due to the genetic code: life's experiences, nutritional intake, and a whole host of other things make just as much of a difference.
---It's easy to try to think so little of it because we don't have to look at it...but the situation is what it is.---
But I HAVE thought about it a great great deal. You can't grant moral rights to a being that has no interests to begin with based simply on future possibilities anymore than you can lock someone in jail just because they have a "potential" to be a murderer. Nor can any genetical fallacy of natural inevitability help.
---My point is that that term should apply to all human lifeforms, irregardless of developmental status. By viewing the meaning of the word "person" differently that I do, we cannot come to a middle ground on the issue.---
Uh no, that's utterly insane. Words are simply a coordination game: they are what we use to express different concepts. In this case, the word "person" has many meanings. I used one. You want to use the other, because you are under the mistaken impression that doing so makes your point for you. And I'm happy to use any meaning you want to use. What I'm not happy to do is allow you to equivocate: to use the connotation of one meaning of the word as a legitimate connotation of another meaning.
---You said that you didn't hear any arguments that were less flimsy than ones about "future persons," and I said that there's no such thing as "future persons." They're persons already.---
Look "person" is a word that has several meanings. However, my particular use of the term "future person" was not an attempt to decide any substantive issue. I don't rule out zygotes from moral consideration simply because they are or are not persons under any particular definition. I was discussing the fact that they are not persons in the legal and psychological sense of the term (and indeed, my usage is much more standard than yours).
Your use of YOUR term, however, IS an attempt to use semantics alone to decide a substantive issue. That's flatly illegitimate as a tactic of argumentation.
---Whereas my values are based on a broader acceptance of humanity in general. I don't just value people I know and can talk to.---
But on what grounds do you value zygotes? So far you've only said that you do based purely on definitional criteria: whether or not you define zygotes as part of "humanity in general." It doesn't matter whether they are or they are not: the question remains: why value the life of a zygote/embryo the same as? "They are both persons" is not any sort of coherent answer, despite being true for one definition of the word.
---It's because I don't limit myself to valuing those I deal with everyday. I don't value a person based on their ability to interact with others or feel and experience the same things I do.---
So do you grant rights to rocks then? Obviously not. WHY? If your answer is "because they aren't human" then you haven't answered the question. That WOULD be precisely wat you are falsely accusing me of: that is, letting semantics do the work of an argument for you. Regardless of whether or not zygotes and, say, even fetuses, fall into the category of "human" you can't simply act as if they were the same thing, and that their differences are irrelevant to their moral stature. None of the traditional justifications for giving beings moral stature even makes sense in the case of zygotes. If you have some NEW justifications that help add new insight, be my guest, but argument from definition isn't going to fly.
---Furthermore, saying that your use of the word person is the "legal" definition isn't a strong argument.---
For goodness sakes, it's not an argument at all! Words are tools of SEMANTIC USAGE. They DO NOT decide substantive issues. All that's important is that when two people are using a word, they both know what the other means. As I've said a million times over, if you're too dense to understand the distinction between semantic and substance, I'm happy to accomodate you by using your definition, or whatever defintion you please. I only ask that you not try to pull a fast one by pretending that the underlying concept is the same.
---As such, I see no reason to deny the unborn basic human rights. Perhaps you should justify why rights should be denied instead of asking me to justify why they should be granted other than that you don't feel a connection to them.---
It has nothing at all to do with simply lacking a "connection" to them: they lack all the basic elements that are required for any being to have interests in the first place! I guess it comes down to sheer incredulity: on what possible grounds can they be accorded moral concern?
---Is whether or not an adult that is murdered felt pain fundamentally relevant to whether or not the action was wrong?---
Yes. Though you'll note I didn't say that it was exclusive, and this is really a side issue (though you appear not to have noticed). Other things, like the fact that adults have interests in being alive, are also relevant.
---Capacity to feel pain is irrelevant to the debate of whether or not ending their life is all right.---
It certainly makes a difference when faced with choices for instance: faced with one person's painful death and another's death without pain. And it certainly matters when we're talking about beings who do NOT have the capacities that make us care about the ending of their lives: it's still wrong to cause them pain, or kill them painfully. A chicken can't anticipate the future or understand not living, but it can still feel pain, and few people would agree that it's morally neutral to cause it pain all other things equal.
---Language is important. The definitions you use are means of classifying objects in your surroundings into one category or another and how you treat it.---
Only by the sloppy. The problem is not what definitions you use, but when you change definitions without fully appreciating the affect on its connotations and related concepts. For instance, you want to stop using a more legal definition of "person" that I've used, which is fine by me. However, you also want to sneak in all the connotations and moral arguments attached to that word into your new word. And that's NOT acceptable.
---By using the term "future person," you quite succinctly deny that the embryo is a person and that it should be accorded the same rights as a person.---
If anyone is guilty of using Orwellian language here, it's you. My use of the word person is pretty darn clear: I'm talking about the class of beings for which we have a developed account of moral rights and legal obligations. This is what the law talks about when it talks about persons. You want, simply by equivocation on the broader meaning of "person," to extend those rights to cells MERELY by using a different definition: without actually making any sort of new case for why the rights and moral considerations of people should be extended to zygotes. You're the one trying to escape argument merely by re-arranging semantics.
---Similarly, people around the turn of the century distinguished between "Americans" and "immigrants" to justify discrimination against them regardless of their actual citizenship status.---
But in this case it doesn't matter what you CALLED them: what matters is that these people had every right to be treated the same, regardless of how they were labeled. Your sentiment is much closer to those people who used language to define away people's rights, in that you want to make rights purely and issue of definition, rather than a discussion of actual moral obligations, actual capacities, and so forth.
---As in my original post, I clarified that if you value human life beyond those that you immediately care for, then the arbitrary distinctions between human and not human in the abortion/fetal stem cell debate should be objectionable.---
What's objectionable is your failure to understand the distinction between definitions (which express concepts) and the concepts they express. You are refusing to acknowledge that when you switch definitions, you've also switched concepts. I, and most moral philosophers, are talking about certain things when we talk about value for "human life." We do that because we've had to THINK of particular things, and we've had to build our arguments on the characteristics of those particular things. My own values why it's wrong to kill other people is based on my experience with them, and my empathy for them, not as definitions, but as actual beings with certain characteristics. Stem cells simply don't fit into that category of things: they have none of the characteristics that are relevant to my value. If you are going to argue that they should have moral consideration, then you are going to have to make a case as to _why_ they should that doesn't simply rely on an arbitrary choice of semantics.
To explain it one last time, you've made the error of applying your value for human life directly to the _definition_ of human life, not to what is actually concieved of when most people speak of human life being of moral consideration for various reasons having to do with people's capacity to have feelings, relationships, interests, expectations, obligaitons, etc. (which zygotes can't have, in any way shape or form). You can define "person" however you wish: that doesn't remove from you the burden of explaining why zygotes/embryos should have the same rights as do the people we deal with everyday.
---It's a genetically unique individual that is forming...yes...a genetically unique individual can be deprived of something.---
Twins are not genetically unique. Is it okay to kill the spare? No. The uniqueness of genetic code is simply not a criteria on which to derive rights. One could mangle with the DNA in any cell and end up with something "unique"... but so what? Or rearrange the letters on a computer printout of the sequenced code. It's still just a cell with information coded into it. It's still just a computer disk with information coded onto it. That information can be used to build a being that has interests, or it cannot be. But cells don't have interests.
---If you set the wheels into motion to create a new being, fertilizing an egg and mixing genes, then there is something there that you can take away from.---
I agree: but what you are taking the life of is a few cells. It's you who is arguing that we should give rights and moral consideration to these cells in lieu of their POTENTIAL. But that's just as silly as giving rights to sperm because of its potential. Whether the wheels are in motion or not (and utterly subjective understanding: I could just as easily argue that by creating you, and giving you a drive to reproduce, we are settingt the wheels in motion for you to impregnate whatever you can), potential is not actuality, and by your own argument, actuality is what's relevant.
---True, they don't have nervous systems yet, but a newborn isn't an intelligent being yet either. Feeling pain is also irrelvent to whether or not its right to kill someone---
I disagree: it's very much relevant (though not exclusive).
---Left to its own devices, an embryo will grow into a child and then an adult.---
No, as has been pointed out. It requires a whole host of special infusions, environments, and so forth. But even that is beside the point: the thing in question is still just undifferentied cells. Regardless of what it could potentially be, why is detroying IT wrong? Where's the argument here, based on what the embryo actually is?
---Begging the question of "future beings" or "potential people" denies that they already are a person -- just an undeveloped one.---
Now you're just playing fast and loose with language. I don't much mind if you want to define "person" in such a way that even the embryo is one (definitions don't determine the truth of anything). But if that's the case then you have to start over with the justification as why it is wrong to kill all people. Because the previous justifications (the ones I and most people accept) are premised on a quite different definition: and you can't make a moral argument simply by choosing definitions.
---These cells die naturally without human malice.---
Eh? They certainly could be killed with human malice: but it's still not wrong to kill them.
---Since they cannot become other people anyway, their deaths are irrelevant.---
Why does that matter? What if they could become other people with slight alterations that activate their codes in the right way? How is that different from the way the uterine lining chemically triggers embryos to develop into fetuses?
---No...I am not. There's not a life there to deprive. You can't deprive someone of life when their very beginnings have never happened....you CAN deprive someone of life when you set the beginnings of their exitance into motion and then suddenly take it away.---
Sorry, but that just runs into the second half of the prong: you're just begging the question by assuming that a zygote is already something of moral concern: a "someone" that can be deprived of something.
---Deprive means "To take away"....you can't take something away from something that does not yet exist.---
My point exactly. But in this case, all you are depriving of life is a cell. The "someone" does not yet exist.
Since "atheist" has been co-opted by religious and agnostics seeking to obfuscate that binary problem, some have suggested using "non-theist" to make things clearer. Sure, atheist MEANS without god belief, and most atheists use it that way, but the connotations are sometimes just too ingrained to bother challenging.
It's still wrong to dismiss entire viewpoints so quickly and sumarily, without addressing them. It's certainly no good to do so by lumping everyone into the same bucket and then tossing it out the window.
---Yes...indoctrinated.--- Obviously, you have a very low opinion of most people's ability to think and question. I never accuse religious believers of believing because they are indoctrinated: and I don't see such a claim as legitimate in this arena either. Certianly, some people are, but simply blanket writing off people's views as indoctrination is pre-emptive Orwellian hand-waving. There are many other reasons for why one view might dominate in certain places than simply a Foucaultian (and, ironically, very lefist!) reference to pure "power."
---Anyplace you see aggression and conflict at the hands of communists you can pretty much define it as a war in the name of 'no God.' The reason is that communism has no deities, only saints and martyrs.---
That makes about as much sense as calling them "wars in the name of no Star Trek" since Mao didn't watch American Sci-Fi. There have certainly been people who didn't believe in god persecuting those who did for their beliefs. But simply not believing in a god is no reason to talk about doing something in the name of no god. I don't brush my teeth "in the name of no god."
---Reguardless of how people feel about whether or not abortion should be allowed, make no illusions about it - you are depriving a human being of life.---
It's more complicated than that. By your understanding, you are depriving a human being of life by not impregnating every woman you meet. The question is when we should grant rights and give moral consideration to something, based on what capacities it has. If you want to extend those to potential capacities, given what you claim is a "normal" course of events (meaning, not anywhere near certain, but what you think should happen, which is already inserting a judgement before justifying it), then you're either stuck with the problem that lots of things are potential other things, and nowhere backwards in a chain of events does that stop, or you've begged the question by deciding that a zygote is something that already matters.
We don't, for instance, give kids a liscence to drive just because if they follow their "normal" course they will one day be responsible enough to drive a car.
If you're referring to the September 11 teaching plans, then I should remind you that those allegations turned out to be utter bullshit. The NEA's site was filled with references to Bush's speeches, CIA factbooks, blamed Al Queda directly, and so on. The "scandelous" quotes came from one off-site link out of hundreds, and it turned out to be talking about not blaming all Muslims: the essay BEGAN by blaming the terrorists.
---It was, if I remember correctly, more like absolute truth and accountability... but I may not have my facts totally straight.---
Sounds like you have no intention of getting your facts straight.
The problem is, stem cells aren't anything like what one thinks about when they think about fetuses. While a reasonable argument can be made against abortion after fetuses have developed past a certain stage, stem cells are nowhere near that stage. They don't even have nervous systems: they are just individual, undifferentied cells. They are chemically nearly indentical from other cells in the human body that will kill em mass all the time without moral quandry (like skin cells, or brain cells). Indeed, I've never heard a reasonable moral response to this that didn't involve positing ad hoc things like souls (which, hell, I could posit just as easily for cars, making scrap yards immoral) or imagining future beings: in short not dealing with the specific thing being considered, whether it has or ever has had any interests.
---It would be hard to argue that a newborn is sentient.---
Are YOU sentient? Can't you see how ridiculous this example is: comparing the sentience of a new born to something that doesn't even have a NERVOUS SYSTEM? While I think the parent goes overboard in his definition of sentience, you go overboard in the opposite direction.
---That said, when you do what they are doing at Stanford you create life that has the potential for sentience---
A pile dog crap has the potential for sentience: a mother eats it, digests it, and the nutrients become part of the baby she's growing inside her. Same difference. It's _existing_ sentience that's the problem, not potential. Everything all the way back to the beginning of time might as well be potential.
---You're confusing the system with its surroundings.---
How so, when I indentified and discussed both?
---I'm talking about the system being the universe and since the universe has no surroundings, it's entropy must always increase for any process.---
Uh, yeah. I love it when people agree with me completely, but somehow manage to act as if they are correcting me. Dumbass.
---To say that if you keep reducing a set with a recursive algorithm will neccassarily reduce the set to a single item requires certain conditions on the elements in the set.---
Conditions I already stated... look it's not THAT hard to work this one out with a piece of paper, or in Excel.
---An MEve will only show up when an entire species is reduced to a very small population size and then manages to recover and survive.---
NO. MEve is NOT an individual who, during the time she lived, had to be the only one (or one of a very few, to bear offspring into the next generation. What she is, is a common maternal ancestor of everyone alive today (i.e. go back in your family tree via maternal lines, and at some point you'll find the same individual) Very different thing.
---But for there to be an MEve for mankind there had to at some point be a very small number of woman who where successfully passing on their genes.---
Again, not at all. The alternate, uncontaminated, maternal lineages die out over many many generations: and this need have nothing at all to do with anything concerning the time MEve lived. Remember, it's not that the entire population, taken as a whole in EACH generation, that contracts back to MEve. Rather, the particular set of people alive today all has MEve as a common maternal ancestor. That's a very different beast, and I don't think you grasp it yet. Try modeling it first.
Don't entire ecosystems thrive on deep sea bacteria? I remember that Blue Planet Discovery Special had shots of both the "hot vent" ecosystem and the "deep seeps" ecosystem. The vents had tubeworms, weird lobsters, and fish. The seeps had tubeworms, muscles, and crabs. The only drawback is that I'm sure all these creatures require the crazy pressures of those depths to survive.
---However, comparing evolution to coin tossing would be like someone that tossed the coin a few billion or more times and had it come up heads every time.---
Not at all. How can you criticize evolution as implausible when you don't even have a basic understanding of what it is? Evolution is not a series of lucky accidents that miraculously happen "just so" to produce us. That's thinking deliberately backwards through a process that worked undeterminativly forwards. It is not a game of chance, but rather a selective process with no PARTICULAR end pre-specified.
The point of my coin example is not to analougize how evolution works, but to explain why some outcomes that seem miraculous are actually inevitable and necessary: and why it's understandable that people get them confused.
Another example: say you close your eyes, and throw a dart at a target on a huge wall. You open your eyes to find that you got a bullseye. The chances against this are phenomenal, indeed. However, that is NOT what's going on with how you're thinking about evolution. What is going on is that you are throwing the dart blind, as before, at a completely blank wall, and then, after it's stuck in the wall at a random point, drawing a target around it in such a way that the dart is in the center of the bullseye! That is, for us to speak of a "probability against" at all, we need to specify the event BEFORE it takes place, not afterwards. The chances of the dart hitting a target are very small when the target was drawn before the throw: the chances of it hitting ANY random spot on the wall, however, are 100%, regardless of how special we come to think of that particular spot as being afterwards.
Now, that's a primer on probability. We still haven't gotten into what's going on with evolution. If you are going to attack evolution, then you at least need to describe it correctly: not as a series of lucky accidents, but rather as a whole bunch of totally random accidents, most of which are neither lucky nor unlucky from ANY hindsight of a particular goal. Of these, only a few are selected according to their adaptability, and then they propogate. Random chance is certainly involved, but the process can just as well rely upon it being TOTALY random: no random event needs to be "just so" for the process to work. That's because the actual "process" is the _selection_ of particular dice throws according to some environmental pressure criteria, not the throwing of the dice.
Now, maybe you were just confused: instead of evolution, you meant abiogenesis. That's a very different story, because "evolution" only takes place when there is fidelistic reproduction. Abiogenesis, on the other hand, WOULD require more chance. However, it STILL isn't so simple as a bunch of lucky coin flips. People doing abiogenesis, just like people doing evolution, aren't looking for a series of lucky chances. Instead, they are looking for natural processes that could have been involved with the production of life. If it were all about an airplane coming together in a whirlwind, there would be nothing to study, and it would indeed be implausible. But that's not what it's about. A simple example of more what it IS about that you can try at home: consider the chaotic mixture of a glass of salt stirred together (use a spoon) with lots of black peppercorns. Now, swirl or shake the glass gently. What happens? The peppercorns almost all float to the top: when you add chaotic motion to a chaotic arrangement, you get a form of sorted order! Now, think about the various ways we could characterize what happened. We COULD say that the event is miraculous, because if you work out the chances of all the peppercorns ending up on top of the salt just by random chance, it is infintesimally small. But in fact, far from nearly impossible, the event is almost _inevitable_: it happens every time. So the simple probability calculation is wrong somehow: it's not correctly characterizing what's actually happening. And what's wrong is that there is a _process_ at work here: when the glass shakes and things have freedom to move around chaotically, gravity is sorting the items by density: in a sense they are ratcheting things upwards. When a peppercorn randomly moves up in the salt, the smaller salt grains fall and fill in underneath it more quickly than the pepper corn can move. Random movements of peppercorns downwards are blocked: random movements upwards are easy. So up is how it travels in the long run. So, here we have our example of how total chaos, when in a particular situation, can actually build order. People doing abiogenesis are looking for processes like this: things that DRIVE the formation of simple molecules, and continue to drive them in a certain direction. That's a VERY different thing from simply waiting around for totally random combinations to happen.
---I fail to see how everything can be explained with no high power involved.---
I don't know what you mean by "high(er?) power." Higher than what, along what scale? The bigger problem is, if you can't explain what your pet theory of a particular higher power is, or how it works, it's no better than no explanation at all. It's like saying "I fail to see how everything can be explained without the involvement of sdfasdfkueifdfdsae." Well, what does the involvement of sdfasdfkueifdfdsae involve, exactly? What is it? How does it work? Either you can answer those questions or you can't: and if you can't you're stuck back at square one with the rest of us.
---I honestly don't understand what atheists believe in this area. Nobody has ever been able to tell me what is outside of space and time.---
It's even worse than that: we don't even know if "outside" is a word that makes any sense to apply to "space" or "time" (the same way "blue" doesn't really make much sense when applied to "justice"). But the fact that no one has any idea about how to even think about these questions doesn't make "God!" the default best answer. "God" just adds and even BIGGER mystery that we ALSO can't explain to the mix, without even doing much of anything to explain what happened (since we can't understand God in the first place).
---Amazing that all those accidents of nature worked out just perfectly, isn't it?---
No, because they didn't. Imagine a coin flipping contest with tiers and thousands of contestants. After several rounds, you'll have a person who has won six or seven coin tosses in a row. Miraculous? Amazing? No: necessarily inevitable.
---I think that is even more unbelievable than Creation.---
Only in the sense that an actual attempt at explanation takes more thought to consider than a complete LACK of any explanation!
Even specifying "the Christian God" isn't anywhere near specific enough. One needs to describe a being in enough theological detail to actually relate it to the world in a concrete and operational way so that we can consider what claims might need to be verified.
Yes, and total entropy in the universe is indeed increasing. That doesn't preclude entropy from decreasing in various places within the universe. If what you were saying were true, the 2nd law woul preclude the formation of molecules: they're higher order structures, after all. It would preclude nuclear fusion that drives stars, and so on. The 2nd law is NOT the idea that simple structures can never get more complex as time goes forward. It is, rather, simply the idea that no reaction is efficient: if you want change, it's going to cost you in lost energy.
---Life happened (somewhere at some time),---
Uh, life is happening now, and according to your take on the 2nd law, it's defying physics. In reality, it's acting completely in accordance with physics: chemical reactions increase order, but at the cost of tons and tons of wasted energy.
---so it must have happened spontaneously or else the entropy of the universe would have decreased and thus violated the second law.---
Eh? What do you mean by "spontaneously"? When you eat food, and it's broken down, and turned into energy, this process is not spontaneous. But, as the second law predicts, it is very far from perfectly efficient: you lose lots of energy to heat loss in the process.
---The second point I was trying to make was that "creation" theory does not necessarily require 100% compliance with the English translation of old Hebrew religious documents.---
Indeed, it doesn't require compliance with ANY story. But it matters what stories are plausible and testable. It also matters that any creations that require "whos" then simlpy require explanation for the origin of the "whos."