I don't mind the question- I mind the other two assumptions: That the company can leech off of society by not paying a living wage for the surrounding area and by not paying for training. These are definite signs of a company to stay the hell away from.
You sure have a strange way of defining "genius" when you've based it solely on factual knowledge. Why not just admit that you're too damn cheap to pay either a living salary for the area or for training? And if you're not willing to do either of those, why the hell should anybody work for YOU and let their skills wither?
Obvious answer here: Partner with a community college, and throw in a few bucks to create the training program that teaches the skills you desire. Hire EVERYBODY out of that training program who gets better than a B average. And be sure to sock away at least 3x their annual salary for severance pay when you have to lay them off.
If more companies did that, there's be more people of the proper skills to hire AND people would begin to regain confidence in accepting this field as a career.
I saw another explaination recently, that the real problem is the double blind HR department. The standard scenario goes something like this:
C-level bigwhig says "We have an opening in IT, pass it on to HR HR says "We have an opening in IT, put out an advert" Response to the advert is 1000+ resumes, which takes HR 3 months just to weed down to 12 perspective candidates.
6 of those candidates have taken other jobs. The other six are put through another 3 months of interviews.
At the end of the interviews, they're lucky if they have ONE candidate suitable.
C-level bigwhig says "It took 6 months to fill ONE IT position? There must be a shortage in IT".
I'm pointing out that there are other thought patterns by which people find truth than mere logic based on arbitrary axioms. There has been 4000 years worth of evidence for astrology collected- whether or not you find that evidence compelling has a lot to do with whether or not your personal arbitrary axioms accept subjective data or not. But you can't say that it doesn't exist- because it does.
I see your argument as being against an intelligent designer, here's why:
If this designer is intelligent (and non-evil), why do we have an appendix that serves no function (as far as I know the cancer argument is not proven), but can be fatal to you?
Who is to say that the Intelligent Designer is Good? Or for that matter, that your death from appendicitis won't accomplish a greater good down the road? What you're really talking about is the problem of evil here- not an argument against there being an intelligent designer at all.
Why haven't hegdehogs evolved to NOT huddle in the same place when a car is coming?
Maybe because the Intelligent Designer doesn't want to break his own rules and there have only been about 6 generations of hedgehogs since cars were invented?
Why do wolves, bears and other predators kill far more prey than they need, given the opportunity?
I'd have to see the proof of that- but I think a large part of it depends on your definition of the word "need". When you don't know where your next kill is coming from, it's usually a good idea if you're a predator to create a storage of more food than you can eat today. Plus there's also the fact of energy storage in the form of fat to get you through that next lean time. Nope, no argument against an Intelligent Designer there- just an argument against an Intelligent Observer:-)
Why do moths willingly fly into open fire that will kill them?
That one has been proven several times to be sex drive- the fire mimics something that without interferance of an intelligent person creating the fire, normally results in a lot of baby moths. Once again, you're choosing to see the small picture rather than the big picture.
I don't know why I'm even doing this...
For the same reason as the rest of your arguments against an intelligent designer: You have a problem with evil, you've never learned to accept death. Some would say that's a good thing- but in my estimation, it's just a sign of immaturity.
You must not be a very good scientist if you believe that choosing evidence to fit your theories rather than reforming your theories to fit the evidence is the function of science.
Including Greek mythology?
Are you suggesting an expedition to Olympus in search of Zeus?
I believe it's already been done- Olympus is a rather short "mountain" after all- but sure, if you wish to research that, you should go yourself. But you should also be prepared to dig...many Greek Gods were once men.
The purpose of that exercise is to keep those who want to live in a world of fantasy from guiding public policy.
And thus instead, we get those who want to live in the fantasy world of limited evidence guiding public policy. The second is far more dangerous.
So are you going to undergo surgery without "data"?
No, you miss my point. I would no more undergo surgery without data than I would with limited data- the second is how mistakes are made. We've just finished quite a scandal where hospitals were hiding data from patients here in Oregon- with disasterous results.
Your claims are getting wilder by the minute.
My claim is quite simple- that philosophically the scientific method creates a blind spot by ignoring data merely because it doesn't fit some preconcieved notion of what data should be.
The proponents of Intelligent Design are the ones who claim to have a different meaning for irreducible complexity (the two words are joined by ID proponents, suggesting that complexity is not just a *common* meaning but an irreducible one - but you knew that and are just intellectually dishonest).
Since when does the common meaning of complexity deny the possibility that the complexity cannot be reduced by natural methods? Or the converse, since when does the common meaning of complexity require that the complexity be created by completely natural methods? If anybody is being intellectually dishonest, it's the so-called scientists- to the extent that they become intellectually insulting.
Which orthodoxy would that be?
Near as I can tell, the orthodoxy of separating science from the other natural philosophies- a line that I personally refuse to draw in the sand. This is done by making up such arbitrary rules such as "evidence must be objective and reproducible".
You should really quit speaking of yourself in third person.
I'm speaking of two groups in the case of the man who believes in only one truth- Christian fundamentalists and scientific fundamentalists. I myself am neither.
I doubt you are running for office, so name regonition is hardly something you need to work so hard to establish.
You're incorrect on that one as well, but there is relative anonymity here. However, when I write in the third person, it's because I'm generalizing a group, which is the common usage of the third person.
All you end up doing in the absence of a run for public office is encourage others to believe you are a loon.
I hope so- only in lunacy is philosophic or scientific progress possible.
A fundamentalist demands that you accept his claims without evidence - purely on faith.
Which is what those who believe in a Random Universe wish us to accept- purely on faith. ID solves this problem by insisting that the universe is not random, but rather purposeful- any appearance of randomness is just a rule we haven't discovered yet.
I have asked for quite the opposite.
No you haven't- you require me to accept your definition of data on faith alone. You require me to believe you are working in a scientific field on faith alone. You've shown me no credentials, and even if you had, you'd have to show that those credentials aren't contaminated with prejudice themselves. There's quite a bit you're ask
Evolution looks at evidence and ID looks at mythology while pretending to look at evidence.
Boy, you just ain't listening. ID looks at evidence, not mythology. Nothing in ID comes from any work of scripture. But I know of no way to break through your bigotry and prejudice to prove that to you, so I believe we are at an end created by your own fundamentalism.
The litmus test in my mind is the way that ID proposes a level beyond which we cannot know, a line in the sand, over which the matter becomes Ineffable and Unknowable to Human investigation. We must accept it and never question further.
Since when? Even in YEC, taking the Book of Genesis completly literally, we are made in the image and form of God (I personally think it's the other way around, but I'm trying on an idea for size here), and thus have the power to learn how God did it. ID is even better yet- it claims we can know the mind of God by examining our natural surroundings. If anything- it's science that is claiming (by stopping at the level of random chance for mutation) that there's a level beyond which we cannot know.
Science strives to tell us how eveything works, but can never tell us how to live. Religion and ethics tell us how we should behave, and why the Universe exists.
I completely disagree- read my sig line. There is much that Science can teach us about how to live- and most religious ethics can be proven by science.
Not true - or at least oversimplified. There's an emerging science here. Many things that appear random turn out to be deterministic, just very sensitive to initial conditions. Because there really are underlying rules, patterns can be discovered that just wouldn't be there if the behaviour were really random. Perhaps you've heard of "strange attractors" and "emergent behavior".
Yes- in fact enough that I'm willing to say that the randomness doesn't really exist at all, just rules we haven't discovered yet.
Sadly, the universe lacks this as an empirical or a-priori property. Feel free to decide on something, and live accordingly, but you'll never be able to prove yourself correct.
Ah, but you see, I've found that it does have this as an empirical property. Take sex for instance. It has a definite purpose. It has a set of reactions in the human body to reenforce that purpose; but the reactions are secondary to the purpose. Thus, recreational sex is a denial of the evolutionary purpose of sex; and homosexuality becomes a non- lethal but anti-survival mutation (from the point of view of survival of the DNA). Many other pieces of morality are like this; they can be shown to be pro-evolutionary, and the actions that are against them (in the case of sex, birth control and abortion defeat the purpose of sex) can be shown to be anti-evolutionary.
Now you're on the Discordian party line.:-)
Not quite, because I say it's so purposeful that randomness itself is just an illusion that does not exist.
No, evolution and ID are not one and the same. Evolution does not presume any intelligent entity's involvement, but like all sciences, attempts to determine naturalistic explanations,
Actually, that's a rather recent idea. Almost all sciences previous to 1940 or so did NOT neccessarily assume a lack of a God.
as these are the only ones that we can have any hope of predicting and possibly falsifying.
Also not true. In fact, if Bell's Theorem is right, we have no hope of predicting anything at all- but if God exists then Bell's Theorem is wrong and we've got a new law yet to discover.
I see no reason to try to muddy the waters with definitions of "Intelligent Design" which are more likely simply reiterations of some form of theistic evolution.
That's exactly what they are- but only in a theistic universe do we have a chance of actually predicting or falsifying anything, so what's your problem with that?
Intelligent Design is the formulation of the likes of Dembski and Behe, and is an attempt to remove any mention of a specific Designer (ie. God) so that children in public schools can be taught that there is something wrong with evolution that it requires a being of some sort to fill the gaps.
Well, where the gaps are are in quantum mechanics, not evolution, but in general yes. Why do you have a problem with that? And didn't you just deny the other explaination for those gaps (random chance) above?
This is a god of the gaps argument, a fallacious kind of reasoning that misleads children as to how science works.
Science without God doesn't work- it requires junk like "Random Chance" to fill in the gaps. And since you denied Random Chance above, and The God of the Gaps here, what do you propose would fill in the gaps?
Evolution, on the other hand, is the observation that the genetic makeup of populations changes over time, through mutations produced by different events (which may be random).
Ah, so you do believe in random chance- not seeing that the gaps are still there, you've just replaced God with a throw of the dice to explain the difference between predictions and reality.
If there is an Intelligent Designer involved, it is the business of science to state what that might be, unless one can produce evidence for such an Intelligent Designer.
Why is it not the business of science? Or better yet, if it's not the business of science, why not let the next generation expand science until it is the business of science again? I despise chaos- but censorship in the schools is worse.
Do you want to be taken seriously as a science? Fine. Stop talking about determinisitc universes, and work in the physical one. For starters, take a few tons of soil, flesh out the rest of Professor Behe's experimental idea, control the conditions, and report the findings. It would cost less than the Dover legal fees, and would generate more interest and respect in the scientific community than all ID essays to date. Who knows? If the data matches, perhaps you might even win some converts. Those converts might even use that data to formulate new hypotheses, and new experiments. That is how science advances.
Exactly the sort of thing to (tieing WAY back to the begining of the discussion) put in an exhibit on ID, don't you think? Especially if you used clear sides for the box to put the soil in......
I would prefer that no determination, no discrimination, be made at all. All information is useful to those who care to look at it; those who do not care to look at it will rail against it saying "no data has been presented" because what has been presented is not what they consider data. They will also claim to not understand perfectly normal english words like irreducible and complexity, in an effort to preserve their orthodoxy. What is really sad is the man who thinks that there's only one truth and he's got a hold of it. He will claim that other people are fundamentalists- not realizing that he's holding to and defending fundamentals himself.
In some ways- though an actual troll you'd never get to change that way. I'm trying to get people to think outside of their boxes- whatever box they are in- and see that the debate is stupid because there should be no debate. ID is just as reasonable as evolution is; it's idiots on the far ends of the spectrum that make them different.
Wouldn't it be something if the folks that repeat this canard would actually try to learn something. Evolution is no more random than any other natural process.
I'll agree with you on that one! There is no randomness in the universe- all the laws were set at the beginning, and have not changed. It's OUR understanding that changes, not the laws. No matter what some atheist claims.
But the point here is that evolution is not simply a random process, and to characterize it as such is at best a demonstration of ignorance, and at worst a dishonest strawman.
And that's why I say, in the end result, evolution and ID are one and the same.
Uh- why not just pay for a 2nd IP address from the company, put a switch between the routers and your modem, and hook the routers up in parallel instead of dasiy chaining them?
Oddly enough, most scientists take *exactly* the opposite view: that natural laws can be trusted, but laws that exist at the pleasure of some God(ess) could be changed at a whim.
And looking at many of the cults that worship false idols such as the Bible, I have a tendency to agree with them to some extent. But that doesn't mean one should throw out the God due to some stupid believers...
And, BTW, the way you're using "chaos" you probably mean "disorder, randomness, entropy", while I would use "chaos" in the technical/mathematical sense of a blending of underlying rules and apparant randomness.
That would be corret to some extent- the problem comes in that if you mix rules and "apparent" randomness, the rules no longer apply.
Chaos in *that* sense is clearly preferable to either too much order or too much randomness, as either end of the spectrum describes a universe which couldn't support life (or anything interesting).
Depends on what you think the purpose of life is- personally, I find a universe where there is definite right and wrong extremely interesting- and one where right and wrong depend on which quark I got up with this morning extremely distressing and not at all interesting.
As the quantum computing fellows have discovered: without *some* entropy, there is no progress.
True enough also- which means that perhaps it's not as purposeless as some would have us believe.
Exactly my point- who are you to decide what is data and what is not? You've already decided, by taking on that profession, to ignore data. That's the danger of the scientific method- it traps you into a single method of thought, and does not allow you to explore other methods of thought.
To that end, thanks for proving what I've said all along- I even got you in the message above to deny that events are data, and exploring the philosophical meaning behind the theories put forth. Have fun in your limited playground.
I'm glad you refered to it again- the response has been such that I'm up against the 30-messages-in-4-hours limit.
I replied to this on another thread - to be a scientific theory, it must be both testable and make useful predictions. Your version of ID makes no useful predictions. If it's true, the science of evolution remains unchanged. Sure, it becomes a study of the rules that God chose rather than the rules that came to be through some other process, but either way the it's the same set of rules being studied, with the same theory of evolution being true.
How we came into being is almost beside the point on the usefulness. Here's what I see as the usefulness (and this is more against classical evolution than for ID, but what the heck): rules that came through another process that included chaos cannot be trusted to remain the same a second from now, let alone over billions of years. That theory is so NOT useful, that God choosing the rules is preferable- because it gives us a way to actually be able to trust the rules, even if we don't know what all the rules are yet, we can trust the ones we know about. That's why I say ID is opposed to chaos, not opposed to evolution.
And, as a Dicsordian, I'm your polar opposite. And I, for one, do not welcome our artificially intelligent overlords, marxist or otherwise.
Which also explains why you're against ID- you're actually against scientifically verifiable hypothesis to begin with, prefering chaos to order.
The point is not that ID has "elements of" evolution. It's that it has no falsifiability.
Elsewhere in this discussion I proposed an experiment which makes ID falsifiable. You can go find it, but in essence it hinges on a deteriministic universe vs a random one. And you'd need 18 billion years to actually run the experiment, because the complexity is irreducible, you actually need to do everything God did to repeat the experiment.
As a side note, I don't know how you can think that there is 4000 years of "empirical evidence" (whatever that means) for astrology. Then again, maybe I misread you.
It was practiced and relied upon for 4000 years by mankind- and in that time built up quite an interesting record of successfull predictions. Empirical evidence is sometimes subjective, and sometimes objective- but it is always tied to an eyewitness of some sort. You might call it "First Hand Evidence".
I have read it- and I still insist that neither the evolutionists nor the IDers realize how close they are to each other. The one sticking point is randomness- and I come down firmly on the side of ID there.
But have you ever examined the idea of astrology seriously? There's 4000 years worth of empirical evidence for it.
Explain again the testable predictions made by ID?
Theoretically testible- it would take you 18 billion years to actually test them. The testible prediciton of ID is this: If you knew everything God knows, every physical law, you could create a universe, imbue it with those EXACT physical laws at planck time, and run it forward 18 billion years- which should produce a being exactly like you, in a species exactly like human beings. The alternative, with random chance, says that the species would NOT be exactly like you- randomness would have entered in- but would still live among these physical laws as well as you do.
And, BTW, since you like exploring bullshit *economic* theories as well, could you mail me all your money and tell me how that works for you? Thanks.
Where do you find that in Marxism, let alone in a hacked version of Marxist Capitalism run by artificial intelligences to end chaos? Hey- I think you've just discovered the link in my beliefs- I'm pro-order and anti-chaos.
The GP never said a word about not believing in the existence of Planck time. Argue your case rationally or admit you don't have a case.
Got something against the irrational? Then you must have something against evolution- it's insistance upon randomness is irrational.
However, having said that- the GP is so bigotted against anything outside of his worldview that I needed something to shock him out of his bigotry. I may have succeeded, I may not have- but the point is different than you think it is.
Your point about Planck tiem is no germane to your proof.
So says YOU, but who are YOU to judge what is and is not germane to MY proof? You asked for:
1) data to support ID
Which I offered in the form of the existance of something that according to the second law of thermodynamics, should not exist- the ordering of physical laws at Planck Time during the big bang. For it not to support ID- it's now upon you to show how those physical laws could have come about without an input of information into the closed system of the universe at Planck time.
2) a scientifically defensible definition of 'irreducible complexity'.
To which I offered the example of the physical laws at planck time, for which nobody has been able to offer a grand unified field theory yet that makes sense of why the physical constants of the universe are what they are.
And how does this fact support ID?
The *only* useful difference between ID and evolution is this question- given the same set of physical laws, could species evolve different than they did? Evolution claims yes- randomness exists in the universe, and it's possible that a different set of mutations would allow a different species to come into being and become intelligent. ID claims no- that even if we don't fully understand them yet, every little quark anywhere must obey laws set down at Planck Time, and from those laws everything else can be extrapolated. It's a rather diest form of ID- and most YECers would reject it out of hand- but it is a testible form of ID in theory- if you're interested we could run an 18 billion year experiment towards proving it...
Scientific thought requires data and managable nomenclature.
And the problem is, you've rejected some of the data without examining it. And just because a nomenclature is different from what you're used to does not mean that it is unmanageable, it just means that you have to learn something.
Um.... how about the meaning of the word "supernatural?"
Being beyond nature. God does not have to be beyond nature- he can choose to work within it, and since he's the one who designed the laws, one could say it's within his nature to follow the laws of nature. Any appearance to the contrary is more likely our lack of understanding of the laws of nature than God failing to follow the laws he wrote.
Sorry, but that's kind of like asking "What makes you think the stars are astronomical?"
Exactly- it's a statement designed to break you out of a box that others put you in.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mind the question- I mind the other two assumptions: That the company can leech off of society by not paying a living wage for the surrounding area and by not paying for training. These are definite signs of a company to stay the hell away from.
You sure have a strange way of defining "genius" when you've based it solely on factual knowledge. Why not just admit that you're too damn cheap to pay either a living salary for the area or for training? And if you're not willing to do either of those, why the hell should anybody work for YOU and let their skills wither?
Obvious answer here: Partner with a community college, and throw in a few bucks to create the training program that teaches the skills you desire. Hire EVERYBODY out of that training program who gets better than a B average. And be sure to sock away at least 3x their annual salary for severance pay when you have to lay them off.
If more companies did that, there's be more people of the proper skills to hire AND people would begin to regain confidence in accepting this field as a career.
I saw another explaination recently, that the real problem is the double blind HR department. The standard scenario goes something like this:
C-level bigwhig says "We have an opening in IT, pass it on to HR
HR says "We have an opening in IT, put out an advert"
Response to the advert is 1000+ resumes, which takes HR 3 months just to weed down to 12 perspective candidates.
6 of those candidates have taken other jobs. The other six are put through another 3 months of interviews.
At the end of the interviews, they're lucky if they have ONE candidate suitable.
C-level bigwhig says "It took 6 months to fill ONE IT position? There must be a shortage in IT".
OK, that does it. Say WHAT!?
:-)
I'm pointing out that there are other thought patterns by which people find truth than mere logic based on arbitrary axioms. There has been 4000 years worth of evidence for astrology collected- whether or not you find that evidence compelling has a lot to do with whether or not your personal arbitrary axioms accept subjective data or not. But you can't say that it doesn't exist- because it does.
I see your argument as being against an intelligent designer, here's why: If this designer is intelligent (and non-evil), why do we have an appendix that serves no function (as far as I know the cancer argument is not proven), but can be fatal to you?
Who is to say that the Intelligent Designer is Good? Or for that matter, that your death from appendicitis won't accomplish a greater good down the road? What you're really talking about is the problem of evil here- not an argument against there being an intelligent designer at all.
Why haven't hegdehogs evolved to NOT huddle in the same place when a car is coming?
Maybe because the Intelligent Designer doesn't want to break his own rules and there have only been about 6 generations of hedgehogs since cars were invented?
Why do wolves, bears and other predators kill far more prey than they need, given the opportunity?
I'd have to see the proof of that- but I think a large part of it depends on your definition of the word "need". When you don't know where your next kill is coming from, it's usually a good idea if you're a predator to create a storage of more food than you can eat today. Plus there's also the fact of energy storage in the form of fat to get you through that next lean time. Nope, no argument against an Intelligent Designer there- just an argument against an Intelligent Observer
Why do moths willingly fly into open fire that will kill them?
That one has been proven several times to be sex drive- the fire mimics something that without interferance of an intelligent person creating the fire, normally results in a lot of baby moths. Once again, you're choosing to see the small picture rather than the big picture.
I don't know why I'm even doing this...
For the same reason as the rest of your arguments against an intelligent designer: You have a problem with evil, you've never learned to accept death. Some would say that's a good thing- but in my estimation, it's just a sign of immaturity.
Translation: no science.
After all, that it the function of science.
You must not be a very good scientist if you believe that choosing evidence to fit your theories rather than reforming your theories to fit the evidence is the function of science.
Including Greek mythology?
Are you suggesting an expedition to Olympus in search of Zeus?
I believe it's already been done- Olympus is a rather short "mountain" after all- but sure, if you wish to research that, you should go yourself. But you should also be prepared to dig...many Greek Gods were once men.
The purpose of that exercise is to keep those who want to live in a world of fantasy from guiding public policy.
And thus instead, we get those who want to live in the fantasy world of limited evidence guiding public policy. The second is far more dangerous.
So are you going to undergo surgery without "data"?
No, you miss my point. I would no more undergo surgery without data than I would with limited data- the second is how mistakes are made. We've just finished quite a scandal where hospitals were hiding data from patients here in Oregon- with disasterous results.
Your claims are getting wilder by the minute.
My claim is quite simple- that philosophically the scientific method creates a blind spot by ignoring data merely because it doesn't fit some preconcieved notion of what data should be.
The proponents of Intelligent Design are the ones who claim to have a different meaning for irreducible complexity (the two words are joined by ID proponents, suggesting that complexity is not just a *common* meaning but an irreducible one - but you knew that and are just intellectually dishonest).
Since when does the common meaning of complexity deny the possibility that the complexity cannot be reduced by natural methods? Or the converse, since when does the common meaning of complexity require that the complexity be created by completely natural methods? If anybody is being intellectually dishonest, it's the so-called scientists- to the extent that they become intellectually insulting.
Which orthodoxy would that be?
Near as I can tell, the orthodoxy of separating science from the other natural philosophies- a line that I personally refuse to draw in the sand. This is done by making up such arbitrary rules such as "evidence must be objective and reproducible".
You should really quit speaking of yourself in third person.
I'm speaking of two groups in the case of the man who believes in only one truth- Christian fundamentalists and scientific fundamentalists. I myself am neither.
I doubt you are running for office, so name regonition is hardly something you need to work so hard to establish.
You're incorrect on that one as well, but there is relative anonymity here. However, when I write in the third person, it's because I'm generalizing a group, which is the common usage of the third person.
All you end up doing in the absence of a run for public office is encourage others to believe you are a loon.
I hope so- only in lunacy is philosophic or scientific progress possible.
A fundamentalist demands that you accept his claims without evidence - purely on faith.
Which is what those who believe in a Random Universe wish us to accept- purely on faith. ID solves this problem by insisting that the universe is not random, but rather purposeful- any appearance of randomness is just a rule we haven't discovered yet.
I have asked for quite the opposite.
No you haven't- you require me to accept your definition of data on faith alone. You require me to believe you are working in a scientific field on faith alone. You've shown me no credentials, and even if you had, you'd have to show that those credentials aren't contaminated with prejudice themselves. There's quite a bit you're ask
Evolution looks at evidence and ID looks at mythology while pretending to look at evidence.
Boy, you just ain't listening. ID looks at evidence, not mythology. Nothing in ID comes from any work of scripture. But I know of no way to break through your bigotry and prejudice to prove that to you, so I believe we are at an end created by your own fundamentalism.
The litmus test in my mind is the way that ID proposes a level beyond which we cannot know, a line in the sand, over which the matter becomes Ineffable and Unknowable to Human investigation. We must accept it and never question further.
Since when? Even in YEC, taking the Book of Genesis completly literally, we are made in the image and form of God (I personally think it's the other way around, but I'm trying on an idea for size here), and thus have the power to learn how God did it. ID is even better yet- it claims we can know the mind of God by examining our natural surroundings. If anything- it's science that is claiming (by stopping at the level of random chance for mutation) that there's a level beyond which we cannot know.
Science strives to tell us how eveything works, but can never tell us how to live. Religion and ethics tell us how we should behave, and why the Universe exists.
I completely disagree- read my sig line. There is much that Science can teach us about how to live- and most religious ethics can be proven by science.
Not true - or at least oversimplified. There's an emerging science here. Many things that appear random turn out to be deterministic, just very sensitive to initial conditions. Because there really are underlying rules, patterns can be discovered that just wouldn't be there if the behaviour were really random. Perhaps you've heard of "strange attractors" and "emergent behavior".
:-)
Yes- in fact enough that I'm willing to say that the randomness doesn't really exist at all, just rules we haven't discovered yet.
Sadly, the universe lacks this as an empirical or a-priori property. Feel free to decide on something, and live accordingly, but you'll never be able to prove yourself correct.
Ah, but you see, I've found that it does have this as an empirical property. Take sex for instance. It has a definite purpose. It has a set of reactions in the human body to reenforce that purpose; but the reactions are secondary to the purpose. Thus, recreational sex is a denial of the evolutionary purpose of sex; and homosexuality becomes a non- lethal but anti-survival mutation (from the point of view of survival of the DNA). Many other pieces of morality are like this; they can be shown to be pro-evolutionary, and the actions that are against them (in the case of sex, birth control and abortion defeat the purpose of sex) can be shown to be anti-evolutionary.
Now you're on the Discordian party line.
Not quite, because I say it's so purposeful that randomness itself is just an illusion that does not exist.
I agree with that- though Stephen J. Gould may not...there's a reason why the atheists are on the side of evolution in this debate.
No, evolution and ID are not one and the same. Evolution does not presume any intelligent entity's involvement, but like all sciences, attempts to determine naturalistic explanations,
Actually, that's a rather recent idea. Almost all sciences previous to 1940 or so did NOT neccessarily assume a lack of a God.
as these are the only ones that we can have any hope of predicting and possibly falsifying.
Also not true. In fact, if Bell's Theorem is right, we have no hope of predicting anything at all- but if God exists then Bell's Theorem is wrong and we've got a new law yet to discover.
I see no reason to try to muddy the waters with definitions of "Intelligent Design" which are more likely simply reiterations of some form of theistic evolution.
That's exactly what they are- but only in a theistic universe do we have a chance of actually predicting or falsifying anything, so what's your problem with that?
Intelligent Design is the formulation of the likes of Dembski and Behe, and is an attempt to remove any mention of a specific Designer (ie. God) so that children in public schools can be taught that there is something wrong with evolution that it requires a being of some sort to fill the gaps.
Well, where the gaps are are in quantum mechanics, not evolution, but in general yes. Why do you have a problem with that? And didn't you just deny the other explaination for those gaps (random chance) above?
This is a god of the gaps argument, a fallacious kind of reasoning that misleads children as to how science works.
Science without God doesn't work- it requires junk like "Random Chance" to fill in the gaps. And since you denied Random Chance above, and The God of the Gaps here, what do you propose would fill in the gaps?
Evolution, on the other hand, is the observation that the genetic makeup of populations changes over time, through mutations produced by different events (which may be random).
Ah, so you do believe in random chance- not seeing that the gaps are still there, you've just replaced God with a throw of the dice to explain the difference between predictions and reality.
If there is an Intelligent Designer involved, it is the business of science to state what that might be, unless one can produce evidence for such an Intelligent Designer.
Why is it not the business of science? Or better yet, if it's not the business of science, why not let the next generation expand science until it is the business of science again? I despise chaos- but censorship in the schools is worse.
Do you want to be taken seriously as a science? Fine. Stop talking about determinisitc universes, and work in the physical one. For starters, take a few tons of soil, flesh out the rest of Professor Behe's experimental idea, control the conditions, and report the findings. It would cost less than the Dover legal fees, and would generate more interest and respect in the scientific community than all ID essays to date. Who knows? If the data matches, perhaps you might even win some converts. Those converts might even use that data to formulate new hypotheses, and new experiments. That is how science advances.
Exactly the sort of thing to (tieing WAY back to the begining of the discussion) put in an exhibit on ID, don't you think? Especially if you used clear sides for the box to put the soil in......
Would you prefer a baker make that determination?
I would prefer that no determination, no discrimination, be made at all. All information is useful to those who care to look at it; those who do not care to look at it will rail against it saying "no data has been presented" because what has been presented is not what they consider data. They will also claim to not understand perfectly normal english words like irreducible and complexity, in an effort to preserve their orthodoxy. What is really sad is the man who thinks that there's only one truth and he's got a hold of it. He will claim that other people are fundamentalists- not realizing that he's holding to and defending fundamentals himself.
In some ways- though an actual troll you'd never get to change that way. I'm trying to get people to think outside of their boxes- whatever box they are in- and see that the debate is stupid because there should be no debate. ID is just as reasonable as evolution is; it's idiots on the far ends of the spectrum that make them different.
Wouldn't it be something if the folks that repeat this canard would actually try to learn something. Evolution is no more random than any other natural process.
I'll agree with you on that one! There is no randomness in the universe- all the laws were set at the beginning, and have not changed. It's OUR understanding that changes, not the laws. No matter what some atheist claims.
But the point here is that evolution is not simply a random process, and to characterize it as such is at best a demonstration of ignorance, and at worst a dishonest strawman.
And that's why I say, in the end result, evolution and ID are one and the same.
Uh- why not just pay for a 2nd IP address from the company, put a switch between the routers and your modem, and hook the routers up in parallel instead of dasiy chaining them?
Oddly enough, most scientists take *exactly* the opposite view: that natural laws can be trusted, but laws that exist at the pleasure of some God(ess) could be changed at a whim.
And looking at many of the cults that worship false idols such as the Bible, I have a tendency to agree with them to some extent. But that doesn't mean one should throw out the God due to some stupid believers...
And, BTW, the way you're using "chaos" you probably mean "disorder, randomness, entropy", while I would use "chaos" in the technical/mathematical sense of a blending of underlying rules and apparant randomness.
That would be corret to some extent- the problem comes in that if you mix rules and "apparent" randomness, the rules no longer apply.
Chaos in *that* sense is clearly preferable to either too much order or too much randomness, as either end of the spectrum describes a universe which couldn't support life (or anything interesting).
Depends on what you think the purpose of life is- personally, I find a universe where there is definite right and wrong extremely interesting- and one where right and wrong depend on which quark I got up with this morning extremely distressing and not at all interesting.
As the quantum computing fellows have discovered: without *some* entropy, there is no progress.
True enough also- which means that perhaps it's not as purposeless as some would have us believe.
Someone who works as a scientist for a living.
Exactly my point- who are you to decide what is data and what is not? You've already decided, by taking on that profession, to ignore data. That's the danger of the scientific method- it traps you into a single method of thought, and does not allow you to explore other methods of thought.
To that end, thanks for proving what I've said all along- I even got you in the message above to deny that events are data, and exploring the philosophical meaning behind the theories put forth. Have fun in your limited playground.
I'm glad you refered to it again- the response has been such that I'm up against the 30-messages-in-4-hours limit.
I replied to this on another thread - to be a scientific theory, it must be both testable and make useful predictions. Your version of ID makes no useful predictions. If it's true, the science of evolution remains unchanged. Sure, it becomes a study of the rules that God chose rather than the rules that came to be through some other process, but either way the it's the same set of rules being studied, with the same theory of evolution being true.
How we came into being is almost beside the point on the usefulness. Here's what I see as the usefulness (and this is more against classical evolution than for ID, but what the heck): rules that came through another process that included chaos cannot be trusted to remain the same a second from now, let alone over billions of years. That theory is so NOT useful, that God choosing the rules is preferable- because it gives us a way to actually be able to trust the rules, even if we don't know what all the rules are yet, we can trust the ones we know about. That's why I say ID is opposed to chaos, not opposed to evolution.
And, as a Dicsordian, I'm your polar opposite. And I, for one, do not welcome our artificially intelligent overlords, marxist or otherwise.
Which also explains why you're against ID- you're actually against scientifically verifiable hypothesis to begin with, prefering chaos to order.
The point is not that ID has "elements of" evolution. It's that it has no falsifiability.
Elsewhere in this discussion I proposed an experiment which makes ID falsifiable. You can go find it, but in essence it hinges on a deteriministic universe vs a random one. And you'd need 18 billion years to actually run the experiment, because the complexity is irreducible, you actually need to do everything God did to repeat the experiment.
As a side note, I don't know how you can think that there is 4000 years of "empirical evidence" (whatever that means) for astrology. Then again, maybe I misread you.
It was practiced and relied upon for 4000 years by mankind- and in that time built up quite an interesting record of successfull predictions. Empirical evidence is sometimes subjective, and sometimes objective- but it is always tied to an eyewitness of some sort. You might call it "First Hand Evidence".
I have read it- and I still insist that neither the evolutionists nor the IDers realize how close they are to each other. The one sticking point is randomness- and I come down firmly on the side of ID there.
But have you ever examined the idea of astrology seriously? There's 4000 years worth of empirical evidence for it.
Explain again the testable predictions made by ID?
Theoretically testible- it would take you 18 billion years to actually test them. The testible prediciton of ID is this: If you knew everything God knows, every physical law, you could create a universe, imbue it with those EXACT physical laws at planck time, and run it forward 18 billion years- which should produce a being exactly like you, in a species exactly like human beings. The alternative, with random chance, says that the species would NOT be exactly like you- randomness would have entered in- but would still live among these physical laws as well as you do.
And, BTW, since you like exploring bullshit *economic* theories as well, could you mail me all your money and tell me how that works for you? Thanks.
Where do you find that in Marxism, let alone in a hacked version of Marxist Capitalism run by artificial intelligences to end chaos? Hey- I think you've just discovered the link in my beliefs- I'm pro-order and anti-chaos.
The GP never said a word about not believing in the existence of Planck time. Argue your case rationally or admit you don't have a case.
Got something against the irrational? Then you must have something against evolution- it's insistance upon randomness is irrational.
However, having said that- the GP is so bigotted against anything outside of his worldview that I needed something to shock him out of his bigotry. I may have succeeded, I may not have- but the point is different than you think it is.
Your point about Planck tiem is no germane to your proof.
So says YOU, but who are YOU to judge what is and is not germane to MY proof? You asked for:
1) data to support ID
Which I offered in the form of the existance of something that according to the second law of thermodynamics, should not exist- the ordering of physical laws at Planck Time during the big bang. For it not to support ID- it's now upon you to show how those physical laws could have come about without an input of information into the closed system of the universe at Planck time.
2) a scientifically defensible definition of 'irreducible complexity'.
To which I offered the example of the physical laws at planck time, for which nobody has been able to offer a grand unified field theory yet that makes sense of why the physical constants of the universe are what they are.
And how does this fact support ID?
The *only* useful difference between ID and evolution is this question- given the same set of physical laws, could species evolve different than they did? Evolution claims yes- randomness exists in the universe, and it's possible that a different set of mutations would allow a different species to come into being and become intelligent. ID claims no- that even if we don't fully understand them yet, every little quark anywhere must obey laws set down at Planck Time, and from those laws everything else can be extrapolated. It's a rather diest form of ID- and most YECers would reject it out of hand- but it is a testible form of ID in theory- if you're interested we could run an 18 billion year experiment towards proving it...
Scientific thought requires data and managable nomenclature.
And the problem is, you've rejected some of the data without examining it. And just because a nomenclature is different from what you're used to does not mean that it is unmanageable, it just means that you have to learn something.
ID is not science.
Repeating lies does not make them truth.
Um.... how about the meaning of the word "supernatural?"
Being beyond nature. God does not have to be beyond nature- he can choose to work within it, and since he's the one who designed the laws, one could say it's within his nature to follow the laws of nature. Any appearance to the contrary is more likely our lack of understanding of the laws of nature than God failing to follow the laws he wrote.
Sorry, but that's kind of like asking "What makes you think the stars are astronomical?"
Exactly- it's a statement designed to break you out of a box that others put you in.