How do you explain that there are indeed humans (and rather a lot) whose favourite number is 4? Hint: there is more than one probability distribution.
i explain it based upon the fact that humans, for most of our time in existence, have rarely dealt with numbers of things greater than a few dozen, or fractional quantities. even in the modern world, where we think of thousands of widgets, or millions of dollars, we just use those terms. we don't conceptualize those many objects in our minds; we couldn't.
we also happen to use a base ten numbering system, so there are really just 10 numbers that come off as "unique". it would be unusual for someone to say "my favorite number is 319.", because that doesn't seem distinct. there's no "brand loyalty" associated with it.
but look at something like the set of chinese characters, which is something like 2000 if memory serves. go ask someone what his favorite character is, and you're far more likely to find a diverse array of choices, because the characters are all distinct, and even have their own visual identity.
whenever i say "prove" in the context of science, i make it clear that i mean "beyond a reasonable doubt" not "in the absolute mathematical sense".
Perhaps consistent or predictable would have been a better word. You don't think the force of gravity applies to some objects and not others or that it might decide to take Friday off do you?
no, gravity has a pretty good track record of applying every day. still, no gods are observed.
and who cares how unlikely it is to come about by chance?
The argument was an attempt to apply your own standard to your beliefs. If anything it shows how weak likelihood is as a reason to disbelieve something.
here you're making a classic logical fallacy i run into all the time in various debates. you're confusing probability before the fact, with probability after the fact. i'll demonstrate with a brief analogy.
say you are dog sitting for a friend while he is away. the dogs, "nature" and "god", bark very rarely. the friend explains that the odds that nature will bark on any given day are 1 in 365, meaning on average he'll bark about once per year. god, he explains, has never been heard barking.
while you sit in another room from where the dogs are hanging out, you can be sure with over 99.7% confidence that nature will not bark. this is like the situation with god. god is extremely unlikely, so we can be extremely certain god does not exist (far more certain than a mere 99.7%, but this is just an example for the sake of argument).
now suppose while you are lying down for a nap, you hear a bark coming from the room where the dogs are. you go in and look at them as they sit there wagging their tails. a creationist friend who has been in the living room reading his bible, walks up beside you as you say, "nature must have done it."
"that can't be, " the creationist says. "it's too improbable. the odds that he would bark are less than.003%." "but that's still the most likely explanation," you say. there's no other dog in there that is any more likely to have been the culprit.
this is the critical difference between probability before and after the fact. while the probability that nature would bark might be exceptionally low, once the bark has occured, the odds that nature was the culprit are virtually 100%.
no god has been observed. but life is observed. we know life exists. so the answer is, out of all known possible explanations for life, which is the most likely. since the only known explanation we have is natural evolutionary processes, it wins by forfeit, so to speak. creationists can talk about intelligent creators til the cows come home, but until they can show an example of one and prove that it would be more likely to "bark" than natural selection, they don't have a leg to stand on. so don't get this misconception that you're appyling my own standards to my belief. you misunderstand the mathematics of the argument, as do most people i end up debating about this issue.
You yourself don't know God does not exist, you believe God does not exist.
you don't know earth is round, you believe it is. we can be more certain that god does not exist, than we can be that earth is round.
Knowledge can be derived from logic. Belief requires a choice to be made by the believer because the idea can be neither proven nor disproven.
this doesn't apply to rationalists. we "believe" whatever is most likely to be true, so belief and knowledge are completely tied together. god almost certainly doesn't exist, so i don't believe in god.
It doesn't seem fair to condemn people for believing something that may or may not be correct.
if there are possible answers to a question, and answer a is 51% likely to be correct, and answer b i
The argument was an attempt to apply your own standard to your beliefs. If anything it shows how weak likelihood is as a reason to disbelieve something.
likelihood, or "probability", is the only reason to believe or disbelieve something. to believe something means to have calculated it's probability of being true over 50%. the problem for a lot of people, such as creationists, is that their calculations and/or data are wrong.
Assuming "possible" is the p word to which you were refering..
no, "proof" or "prove".
my reason for bringing possibility into this was a response to your apparent belief that anyone who believes in a higher power is stupid and misguided.
he is.
While you think the existence of God is incredibly unlikely, others happen to think the existence of a universe that is as ordered as ours is incredibly unlikely to happen by chance.
there is no such thing as "ordered". and who cares how unlikely it is to come about by chance? we don't know of anything intelligent that is any more likely to have made it.
Science works very well for the question of how, but falls miles short on the question of why.
how and why are ultimately the same question.
The exploration of why is where religion and faith become more important. If you're not interested in why that's fine. Just give some consideration to those who are.
why give their irrational beliefs consideration? why not try to educate them to know better and grow up?
A good atheist can kill tens, if not hundreds of millions when he gets the urge.
except i don't think atheists kill because of their atheism. mao supposedly said "religion is poison". but i don't think his atheism drove him to murder. with religion, it's a belief system that says there's this higher power, and you can go to some crazy stuff in service to your lord. we can go plunder in the mid-east because arabs are godless heathens. they can blow up the world trade center because we're godless infidels. i'm sure people would find excuses to do this crap no matter what. but a world full of rationalists would be a whole lot more..rational. that's just my opinion, of course.
Almost all beliefs are irrational, including most scientific beliefs
no, most scientific beliefs are out there in the open for critical analysis by other scientists. if they weren't supported, they'd be exposed as frauds, as numerous frauds have been exposed in the past. you ever heard of the concept of peer review?
most of which we also hold based on the authority of those who communicated them to us. None of us has the time and means to verify all those claims that we've been taught.
but millions of scientists do have the time, and would love to make a name for themselves by knocking down some other guy's theory. people doubted einstein when he said that gravity would bend starlight, but he didn't lose any sleep over it. experiments were performed, they proved him right, and his opponents shut their mouths. for any given things you learn about in the scientific field, you can take one of two theories. either there is a vast conspiracy to keep it from being exposed as a fraud (meaning that hundreds of thousands of scientists would have to willfully participate, as well as stop anyone from leaking the fraud on the internet or in a newspaper), or the science really has been validated by rigorous testing and peer-review.
evolutionary science is one of the most critically and openly analyzed and debated fields in all of science, especially because it is treated as such a political controversial concept (when in fact there is no real controversy). creationists sell millions of books and lots of lecture tours (like philip johnson, whom i once saw myself) by trying to refute evolutionary science. if they had any solid arguments, they would be succeeding. people like me would convert. but that's not happening, because their arguments don't make sense, and don't work. i've even conversed briefly with michael behe, and he couldn't even answer to the enormous flaws in his reasoning that i pointed out. he just choked. and this is the best the anti-science community has to offer? pleeaase.
Religion is a human practice based on human needs. To "fight" it the way you describe is only to make it stronger.
actually, i've talked to the parents of a good friend who were very anti-evolution, and spouted off this "2nd law of thermo" baloney that some idiot told them about. after some length of explaining their misconceptions, they admitted they didn't really know what they were talking about, and had to concede the argument. maybe they still have "faith" in god, but at least they understand that they have no business going to school boards and trying to get evolution taken out of the classroom. at least they understand that their religious faith is not rock solid, and they need to be more open minded. so don't tell me this kind of debate is counter productive, because i've spent my life back in kansas having these kinds of debates.
I know you are just grandstanding and getting all Sturm und Drang, but I think it's indicative of a blind scientism that has contributed to this religious anti-rationalism in its own way.
that's a theory worth pondering. were science teachers to stop teaching evolution in classrooms, would more or less people believe in it? it's a question worthy of its own whole conversation.
Antievolutionists argue that there has been no proof of macroevolutionary processes. However, synthesists claim that the same processes that cause within-species changes of the frequencies of alleles can be extrapolated to between species changes, so this argument fails unless some mechanism for preventing microevolution causing macroevolution is discovered. Since every step of the process has been demonstrated in genetics and the rest of biology, the argument against macroevolution fails.
[macroevolution's] framework has so many holes
name one.
and is so unsupported by our observations.
mutations and selection events are observed, so you're wrong there.
Darwin's treatise hardly has more credibility than a comic book
well, with a few modifications in light of modern genetics knowledge and further observations, it is comprises the core of our entire understanding of biology. the general idea that he proposed, about life's coming about through successive mutations (regardless of whether he understood the genetic basis for these) and selection events, is a clear and obvious fact. how does that eqaute to comic book credibility exacty?
Just so happens that our observations of this world line up very well with the Bible's account of history. Incidentally, archeology has never refuted a single fact in the Bible either.
Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy report that the Hebrews, numbering as many as 2.5 to 3 million, left Egypt, wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years, and finally invaded and conquered the promised land. Most biblical scholars and archaeologists doubt the historical accuracy of this biblical story. Speaking at an archaeological conference at the Royal Ontario Museum, Israeli archaeologist Eliezer Oren reported that "his efforts at more than 80 sites in the Sinai from 1972 to 1982 had not turned up any support for the historical accuracy of when the exodus was supposed to have occurred" (Barry Brown, "Israeli Archaeologist Reports No Evidence to Back Exodus Story," News Toronto Bureau, Feb. 27, 1988). Oren went on to tell of the discovery of papyrus notes that reported the sightings of two fugitive slaves. "They were spotted, and the biblical account of 2.5 million people with 600,000 of military age weren't?" Oren asked.
Oh, and then there's the whole flood thing..*chuckle*.
I feel a lot more confident trusting that sort of book than the whims of evolutionary "science", which must be adjusted every few weeks.
the basis of evolutionary science hasn't changed significantly in decades. it's still darwinian synthesis. descent with modification. continual findings in genetics support that more and more every day. sure, recent fossil finds always cause us to re-evaluate specific processes, like how birds branched off from dinosaurs, or which of our homonid cousins mated with which others and lived where. that hardly qualifies as a substantial change, considering the hierarchical "tree" of biology is mostly stable and not undergoing substantial revision. humans had a common ancestor with chimpanzees about 5 million years ago. that fact isn't changing, much as creationists might like it to just go away. and the one thing that we can glean from this "wavering" in science, when it happens, is that science really is all about constantly evaluating the evidence and adjusting theories to fit, rather
your own belief (that there is no supernatural) is irrational
nature is "everything in extistence", so there's no such thing as supernatural. but of course, that's not the issue. the issue is whether life was created by an intelligent entity.
first of all, i'm not here to debate movies. evolution stands up to rigorous scientific scrutiny on its own, regardless of what transpired in some trial.
i've read several richard dawkins books, and your statement that his "major claims" are wrong is utter nonsense. name one, and i'll happy to engage you. but that site you referred me to says the following:
the origin of the first self-reproducing system is recognized by many scientists as an unsolved problem for evolution, and thus evidence for a Creator.
this statement is a typically absurd creationist argument. we don't know the details of how the earliest self-reproducing system came to be. but the only explanation so far available is that it was caused by random, unintelligent, chemical processes in nature. creationists keep talking about creators, but so far they haven't observed any. when you do observe a creator that has a propensity for creating self-replicators, or even fully fledged cells, drop the scientific community a line and let them know about this exciting discovery. until then, quit pretending there's a case for creation.
by the way, your reference to "out of order" fossils is another one of the most tired and frequently parroted creationist claims. read this.
I'm faulting you for blaming imaginary god for this war and this president instead of the other ongoing slaughters that are much worse.
blame god? i don't believe in god you fucking dumb jarhead. i said, if there was a god, i would be pissed at god for allowing that shit to happen. it's really all irrelevant since i was more than clear that i'm an atheist.
i don't think the iraq war is relatively small. i think it's huge. i know some people who have moved here to california specifically because their families were getting murdered back in africa, and they didn't want to be next. i know they need help too. let me repeat that i was just pulling up one random fucking example of human atrocity, not implying that the iraq war is the biggest tragedy in history.
again, cut the "whiny liberal" bullshit. you can call it "whining" to get upset and emotional. i call it being a human being and actually giving a fuck about your fellow man. if you want to be a callous tough guy, more power to you. we'll see who leads a happier life and has more friends and loved ones, tough guy.
i'm not necessarily advocating pulling out instantly. basically, bush fucked us (i blame him because he ultimately had the power to take the hands out of his puppet ass and refuse to start that war), and now we're in a position where our options are limited, and it's basically a catch-22. but i think the least amount of descruction would come if we'd just put saddam back in power, pull the hell out, and kiss his ass and pay him off not to use biological warfare. maybe we'd be pussies if we did that, but i'm a pragmatist. if that solution wouldn't work, fine..let's choose another one. but right now we're continuing to have our asses handed to us because the goal of the administration is to not stop until we have established "stability" in the region, largely so we can tap into one of the last great sources of petroleum as we reach "peak oil", a concept i'll asssume you're familiar with.
we could find much better solutions to get out of iraq and save as many lives as possible, if we'd focus on helping the country and its citizens, instead of stealing their fucking oil and setting up another puppet government as we're known to do.
i don't have the answers, i'll admit. but i think it all begins with listening to the fucking generals (like shinseki back when he gave unheeded warnings), who actually have a fucking clue. they could try to perform their stated mission instead of going after oil.
once again you prove, with your picture, that you think atrocity negates atrocity. just keep thinking that. yeah, fuck trying to go after this president for sending us into a totally bullshit war and killing over a hundred thousand so far. let's just stop getting upste about it, because that's too "whiny".
actually, we liberals do have the moral high ground, because while dumb fuck republicans are raiding other nations for their resources, other republicans are choosing a president based upon his anti-gay-marriage sentiments, as if some other person's sex life is more important than hundreds of thousands of people's lives. we're donating time and resources to limiting the danger of this madman in office as much as possible. bono went after bush for failing to meet his pledges of aid to africa for fighting aids and poverty.
if you look around at any atrocity going on in the world, the people trying to help are mostly liberals, meanwhile republicans are content making good money and driving around their suvs as they spew more than their fair share of toxic substances into the atmosphere. republicans work to fuck workers over and take away their benefits, while liberals make things like osha.
so i'm not even sure what you mean when you say this is all political. why would i give a fuck about politics? why would i care at all about who is in office and what he's doing? just to have a side to cheer for? if that's t
no one's claiming god is impossible. it's possible that the middle of the moon is made of cheese. it's just not very likely, so it would be absurd to believe in it. we can accept it as a matter of fact that it's not true, because it's overwhealmingly unlikely, beyond reasonable doubt. i don't understand why people always want to bring the "p" word into this discussion.
you say a religion without faith is pointless. i say faith is pointless. faith is not observation or evidence. faith is meaningless. faith is believing with out regard to, or even in spite of, the facts. if you use faith, you might as well believe in 50-meter-tall pumpkins that walk around on legs.
oh my god!! i just saw one!!!
please don't bore me with the philosophical da da yadda yadda kant "my arm could just be a figment of my imagination" horse manure. those guys are taking it too far into purely speculative territory. yeah, i agree that we can't know much about the universe. i don't even believe it's possible for an object (or collection of objects) to "know" anything, including whether they exist. so i don't believe i can even know that i exist. maybe i do..maybe i don't. but that's outside the scope of this discussion, where we are at least assuming the universe is real..atoms are real..we can use isometric dating on fossils, etc. etc.
What is missing is teaching students the importance of doubt and skepticism in all scientific endeavors.
in a lot of ways i agree with that statement. kids need to learn to question more. don't just go buy a fucking magnetic bracelet because some fat bald rich guy on an infomercial is wearing it as he sweats like a pig and clumsily bats a tennis ball back to his staged opponent with a gleaming smiling smile on his face, and a little orbit gum style "chinggg" echoing down his throat.
oh, this is rich. my penis size?! are you fucking kidding me? how desperate, and gay, are you?
i was using this war as but one example of the incalculable amount of suffering throughout the planet. i'm not going to list every atrocity that has happened or is happening, even though i'm sure that would still leave you room to make another naive and ignorant criticism of my position.
yours is the most pathetically stupid kind of stance on this kind of issue. you have this assinine idea that if a lot of atrocities are happening, one is less significant. i'm sorry i can't relate to that chimpanzee spin you're putting on things. you're the kind of person who needs to be stuck right in the middle of the guts and gore to fight for your life, as you crouch in tears and wet your pants, so you can see how "petty" war is.
are you trying to knock the idea of an emotional reaction to a fucking war that we caused!? you're damned right i get emotional about this, and if i could punch the whole bush administration in their mouths one by one, and get away with it, you'd better believe i would. i'm proud of these emotions.
don't spout off this played out "whiney liberal" schpiel that you copped off sean hannity, you wannabe. do you really think that it's hurting our progress to get angry and march against the war, write our senators and congressman, and demand answers? what do you suggest--inaction? should we just toughen up and get more cynical like you? yeah, that would be productive, i'm sure.
you need to stop for a second and get your head out of your ass. yes, there are huge problems in the world, like global warming, which will ultimately probably cause more deaths than wars. that doesn't mean you just stand there twiddling your thumbs as we wage a war that was built on lies. you get angry, and do someting about it instead of being a little bitch, which is apparently what you suggest.
how about you sign up to go over to iraq and stand there in the line of fire, and we'll just see how long it takes you until you're standing there pissing down your leg and crying, "holy shit..i was wrong, this is a fucking big deal! please send me home sergeant..i miss my mommy and daddy."
there's no such thing as "simple". maybe what you mean is "small" or "having fewer atoms".
Maybe if I dump out my lego a few googleplex times a house will appear. Thats basically what evolution claims.
well, it depends whether you have enough legoes for a whole house. but why are you talking about a house as opposed to any other arrangement of legoes?
Yes, it requires "freakin" html. Hope that's not too much to ask.
If you don't like the theme, go somewhere else.
actually it doesn't require html. that was just the default mode, which i'h now learning to enjoy, despite the fact that slashdot doesn't have gmail-style html editing.
as for the theme, going somewhere else won't change the theme on slashdot, now will it. i'm complaining about the theme on slashdot because it fucking sucks, and they said they were going to modernize it like two months ago. granted, the slashcode site they referred to still was ugly, but less ugly.
You misunderstand me. I did not mean atheists don't fight theism, ignorance, and superstition (though some don't). But you cannot fight something that does not exist.
as i said, i didn't literally mean i fight "god". i fight the concept, and the belief. thus i don't understand why you are replying like this, as if i said i was literally "fighting the creator of the universe". although if god was real, i would love to kick his tail for letting our fucking idiot president kill 100,000 iraqis and 2000 jar heads.
You appeal to something just as unobservable as God with your assertion that anything can just appear.
no, mutations are observed. they are real. they happen.
I suppose your null interpretive framework could account for what we observe in the world, but it certainly is not superior to that put forth in the Bible.
well, let's see. you've got a document that is thousands of years old, was written by multiple people who we know very little about, contains numerous contradictions and historical/scientific errors, and overall has about the same credibility as a comic book. how rational and scientific of you. boy, how do i agrue with that, you genius.
The Bible provides a much more structured and logical interpretation for our observations, so it in fact is the superior framework.
time for me to put on my tinfoil hat. nice talkin with you, crazy guy.
I can't say that I fight for, or against the Invisible Pink Unicorn, since I have no way to know if She exists and leads our lives:)
ahh, but we're talking about god, not a pink unicorn. god is like the pink unicorn, in that neither is observed. but it is different, because there is nothing about the definition of "pink unicorn" that implies anything we can use probablistically.
but now suppose we asserted, "there is just one pink unicorn in existence, and it's favorite number is 4." now nevermind the probability that one even exists to begin with, because we can just take that for granted and shoot down this assertion out of improbability. even if this unicorn existed, the odds that 4 would be its fovarite number would be no greater than one divided by the number of numbers, or "approaching zero". thus we could have more certainty that this assertion was false than we could have certainty that earth is round. after all, none of us have been in a shuttle orbiting earth, and even an apparent view could be faked by advanced technology. mathematical arguments can be much more concrete.
in the case of god, i'm talking about a god that is all-powerful and intelligent, since these are two properties that almost everyone can agree must be a requisite of any meaningful definition of god. so even if an all-powerful being exists, which in and of itself is like saying an invisible pink unicorn exists, the odds that the particular set of algorithmic behaviors it exihibts would be intelligent are exceptionally low, because intelligence is inherently inprobable. as i said, go rearrange some code in a chess program and see how well it plays after that. so long deep blue, we just tried to make you more intelligent, but it went awry. pfft..
if you don't lighten up, just a little, you will be perceived as being every bit as extreme as the religious murdering bastards
there's nothing wrong with being extremist about the right things. i'm extremely intolerant of rape for example.
"God" is the specific entity, "god" is the concept or abstraction.
or maybe people shouldn't name things after generic nouns. i don't call my dog "Dog" for example. i call him killerus maximus. bear in mind that you can't "hear" case in speech, which is how most people do the majority of their communication in a given day. so that argument of yours is pretty much shot down. and i don't want to be your friend--i want to be your teacher. as kanye west said, i'm taking ya'll to school.
Nice way to slip in a plug for your band, "BROKEN LADDER".
riiiight. like a reference on slashdot forums will help out my band. pffft.
Things may not be as black and white as you say. We are essentially debating philosophy here (cause honestly, where are the facts and the data?
the facts and data are that mutations happen, and natural selection happens. chemicals mix about in the atmosphere, particularly in ware (e.g. the ocean). there is at least some realistic probability that these random natural processes brought about life as we see it. combine that with the fact that all life can be hierarchically arranged at the phenotypic and genotypic level (hierarchical, as in like a tree branching down without violating that pattern), as well as ages of genetic divergence congruently supported by both fossils and genetic data, and this explanation becomes far more than plausible.
now compare this to the odds that an intelligent entity created it. we don't know of any intelligent entities that would have been any more likely to have made it than these random processes, much more can explain the hierarchical structure of life or any other features of it (this is called falsifiability). this means that the evolutionary explanation is infinitely more likely than any intelligent explanations, because there are no intelligent explanations at all! so it is indeed that black and white.
A series of selection events to be sure, but stating that those events prove the entire evolutionary theory is a bit of an oversimplification.
no it's not. it's a matter of weighing the relative probabilities of all known potiental explanations. the only known potential explanation is natural unintelligent phenomena, as we do not know of any intelligent entities which could have, even in theory, caused the formation of life on earth.
Mutation events yes, but a new life form did not result. All of that is anecdotal evidence that does not prove evolution as a vehicle for life as we know it.
the thing that causes you to be different from a bird, is the particular sequence of dna rungs that were once in the fertilized egg that was you. were a particular series of mutations to have taken place at that time, you could have become an elephant, or a giraffe. there is a low, but greater-than-zero, probability that this could happen. it is a fact that genetic mutations can lead to a "new" life form, meaning simply a life form that is genetically different enough to be reproductively incompatible with another specified organism in its family tree.
this isn't "anectdotal" evidence. this fact.
If you can use those, then I can provide things that run contrary to natural selection and yet exist (man's morals*
morality has very well analyzed and publicized roots in natural selection. genes which cause an organism to help others around it, can be beneficial to their own perpetuation, because other organisms in proximity to the specified host will be likely to also carry that gene. this is especially true if the gene produces some sort of detectable feature, and tends to cause the behavior toward other members who also exhibit that feature. also, if you have two groups, x and y, and x has a gene that causes cooperative and altruistic behavior, whereas y causes directly selfish behavior, x will likely fare better than y. natural selection can select on the level of entire populations. you might be surprised to learn that darwin had already tackled this issue in the late 1800's: source
even if there were no conceivable means by which selective pressure would tend to select genes for altruism (or "morality" as you can generically refer to it), that wouldn't be a problem for modern evolutionary theory, as a series of mutations causing feelings of altruism could happen entirely at random, without "intermediate" selected steps. your problem here is that you, like so many i've debated for years and years online, have horrendous
Actually, I think you might be fighting the tranqs the nice nurse gave you, not God.
thousands, if not millions, of people have died from religion and associated irrational hysteria. you can call me crazy for wanting to eradicate that if you want to. i'd call you crazy for not wanting to eradicate it.
I believe the statement was meant to be taken in a somewhat humorous light. You see, Athiests don't fight "God" because they don't believe this "God" exists.
i meant that i fight "god" as in the concept, and the belief, not the being. i think that goes without saying.
That said, I'd vote for you for Dictator. I like your lack of Capitalism. Oh, wait, that should be Capitalization. Whatever.
i do not support the use of two sets of the same letters, or "case sensitivity". i'd prefer all caps, but i know a lot of people say they find that hard to read. if you go to ahref=http://brokenladder.com/rel=url2html-3077htt p://brokenladder.com/> you'll see my true nature.
saying that it's a fact that the mutations are random is basically the same as saying that science has disproved God.
no gods are observed, so there's nothing to disprove. no god(s) has been supported to begin with. we can be overwhealmingly certain that the mutations are random, especially considering that we know what causes them, from carcinogens to copying errors, to radiation. the probability that these mutations were intelligent, and not random, is exceedingly small such that we can call the mutations random as a matter of fact beyond reasonable doubt.
It is a fact that most of the mutations are dead ends and weeded out by natural selection, but that's not quite the same thing.
Just as I have not observed God doesn't mean that my ideas are groundless.
if your ideas run contrary to modern darwinian synthesis and/or evolution, or in support of intelligent design in any way, then yes they are groundless. if you haven't observed anything intelligent (ie "God") that could have, even in theory, created life, then you have absolutely no alternative, and no support for anything but unintelligent natural processes as the cause for life. any other belief system is groundless in full.
I'd venture that *you* have not observed evolution.
sure i have. i have consumed carcinogens, been exposed to radiation, seen a friend who died from cancer lying dead at the funeral, and seen a cat eat a mouse that didn't manage to evade danger. these are examples of mutation events and selection events, which are the processes that caused life to exist.
evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles within a population.
i've been reading this site since around 1997, but never signed up for the forums until recently. i hardly think the amount of time i've spent reading/. has anything to do with the validity of my point.
i remember reading an article last year about greasemonkey, and how a lot of people used it to do things like "make slashdot less ugly". face it dude, the site is ugly.
you're "contentless" baloney schpiel doesn't take into account the fact that the page could be made to look vastly better without affecting the content in anyway. The best way to help it would be to take out all of the green bars in the first place, and make it more minimalistic and legible. but the color scheme is so annoying it makes it hard to focus on the content. a LOT of peope agree with this, otherwise they woulddn't be going so far as to mess with how their browser displays it.
yours is a typical geek rant, because geeks are clueless about ui. they are notorious for it.
Everything in science is technically a theory -- there's the theory of gravitation, the atomic theory, etc. A fact is simply a theory with overwhelming support.
this is not correct. to quote the late stephen jay gould:
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Atheists do not and never will fight against "God".
that's where you're wrong. i certainly do fight against theism, and irrational beliefs in general. i will fight it with my dying breath, even if it comes to burning down churches. you put me in power as dictator right now, i'll sterilize every last person i can find who has claimed theistic belief.
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we also happen to use a base ten numbering system, so there are really just 10 numbers that come off as "unique". it would be unusual for someone to say "my favorite number is 319.", because that doesn't seem distinct. there's no "brand loyalty" associated with it.
but look at something like the set of chinese characters, which is something like 2000 if memory serves. go ask someone what his favorite character is, and you're far more likely to find a diverse array of choices, because the characters are all distinct, and even have their own visual identity.
none of these issues concern a random entity.
no, gravity has a pretty good track record of applying every day. still, no gods are observed.
here you're making a classic logical fallacy i run into all the time in various debates. you're confusing probability before the fact, with probability after the fact. i'll demonstrate with a brief analogy.
.003%." "but that's still the most likely explanation," you say. there's no other dog in there that is any more likely to have been the culprit.
say you are dog sitting for a friend while he is away. the dogs, "nature" and "god", bark very rarely. the friend explains that the odds that nature will bark on any given day are 1 in 365, meaning on average he'll bark about once per year. god, he explains, has never been heard barking.
while you sit in another room from where the dogs are hanging out, you can be sure with over 99.7% confidence that nature will not bark. this is like the situation with god. god is extremely unlikely, so we can be extremely certain god does not exist (far more certain than a mere 99.7%, but this is just an example for the sake of argument).
now suppose while you are lying down for a nap, you hear a bark coming from the room where the dogs are. you go in and look at them as they sit there wagging their tails. a creationist friend who has been in the living room reading his bible, walks up beside you as you say, "nature must have done it."
"that can't be, " the creationist says. "it's too improbable. the odds that he would bark are less than
this is the critical difference between probability before and after the fact. while the probability that nature would bark might be exceptionally low, once the bark has occured, the odds that nature was the culprit are virtually 100%.
no god has been observed. but life is observed. we know life exists. so the answer is, out of all known possible explanations for life, which is the most likely. since the only known explanation we have is natural evolutionary processes, it wins by forfeit, so to speak. creationists can talk about intelligent creators til the cows come home, but until they can show an example of one and prove that it would be more likely to "bark" than natural selection, they don't have a leg to stand on. so don't get this misconception that you're appyling my own standards to my belief. you misunderstand the mathematics of the argument, as do most people i end up debating about this issue.
you don't know earth is round, you believe it is. we can be more certain that god does not exist, than we can be that earth is round.
this doesn't apply to rationalists. we "believe" whatever is most likely to be true, so belief and knowledge are completely tied together. god almost certainly doesn't exist, so i don't believe in god.
if there are possible answers to a question, and answer a is 51% likely to be correct, and answer b i
but millions of scientists do have the time, and would love to make a name for themselves by knocking down some other guy's theory. people doubted einstein when he said that gravity would bend starlight, but he didn't lose any sleep over it. experiments were performed, they proved him right, and his opponents shut their mouths. for any given things you learn about in the scientific field, you can take one of two theories. either there is a vast conspiracy to keep it from being exposed as a fraud (meaning that hundreds of thousands of scientists would have to willfully participate, as well as stop anyone from leaking the fraud on the internet or in a newspaper), or the science really has been validated by rigorous testing and peer-review.
evolutionary science is one of the most critically and openly analyzed and debated fields in all of science, especially because it is treated as such a political controversial concept (when in fact there is no real controversy). creationists sell millions of books and lots of lecture tours (like philip johnson, whom i once saw myself) by trying to refute evolutionary science. if they had any solid arguments, they would be succeeding. people like me would convert. but that's not happening, because their arguments don't make sense, and don't work. i've even conversed briefly with michael behe, and he couldn't even answer to the enormous flaws in his reasoning that i pointed out. he just choked. and this is the best the anti-science community has to offer? pleeaase.
actually, i've talked to the parents of a good friend who were very anti-evolution, and spouted off this "2nd law of thermo" baloney that some idiot told them about. after some length of explaining their misconceptions, they admitted they didn't really know what they were talking about, and had to concede the argument. maybe they still have "faith" in god, but at least they understand that they have no business going to school boards and trying to get evolution taken out of the classroom. at least they understand that their religious faith is not rock solid, and they need to be more open minded. so don't tell me this kind of debate is counter productive, because i've spent my life back in kansas having these kinds of debates. that's a theory worth pondering. were science teachers to stop teaching evolution in classrooms, would more or less people believe in it? it's a question worthy of its own whole conversation.
from http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.htm l:
name one.
mutations and selection events are observed, so you're wrong there.
well, with a few modifications in light of modern genetics knowledge and further observations, it is comprises the core of our entire understanding of biology. the general idea that he proposed, about life's coming about through successive mutations (regardless of whether he understood the genetic basis for these) and selection events, is a clear and obvious fact. how does that eqaute to comic book credibility exacty?
Welcome to Wonderland, Alice! How about this nifty tid-bit:
Oh, and then there's the whole flood thing..*chuckle*.
the basis of evolutionary science hasn't changed significantly in decades. it's still darwinian synthesis. descent with modification. continual findings in genetics support that more and more every day. sure, recent fossil finds always cause us to re-evaluate specific processes, like how birds branched off from dinosaurs, or which of our homonid cousins mated with which others and lived where. that hardly qualifies as a substantial change, considering the hierarchical "tree" of biology is mostly stable and not undergoing substantial revision. humans had a common ancestor with chimpanzees about 5 million years ago. that fact isn't changing, much as creationists might like it to just go away. and the one thing that we can glean from this "wavering" in science, when it happens, is that science really is all about constantly evaluating the evidence and adjusting theories to fit, rather
nature is "everything in extistence", so there's no such thing as supernatural. but of course, that's not the issue. the issue is whether life was created by an intelligent entity.
first of all, i'm not here to debate movies. evolution stands up to rigorous scientific scrutiny on its own, regardless of what transpired in some trial.
i've read several richard dawkins books, and your statement that his "major claims" are wrong is utter nonsense. name one, and i'll happy to engage you. but that site you referred me to says the following:
this statement is a typically absurd creationist argument. we don't know the details of how the earliest self-reproducing system came to be. but the only explanation so far available is that it was caused by random, unintelligent, chemical processes in nature. creationists keep talking about creators, but so far they haven't observed any. when you do observe a creator that has a propensity for creating self-replicators, or even fully fledged cells, drop the scientific community a line and let them know about this exciting discovery. until then, quit pretending there's a case for creation.
by the way, your reference to "out of order" fossils is another one of the most tired and frequently parroted creationist claims. read this.
blame god? i don't believe in god you fucking dumb jarhead. i said, if there was a god, i would be pissed at god for allowing that shit to happen. it's really all irrelevant since i was more than clear that i'm an atheist.
i don't think the iraq war is relatively small. i think it's huge. i know some people who have moved here to california specifically because their families were getting murdered back in africa, and they didn't want to be next. i know they need help too. let me repeat that i was just pulling up one random fucking example of human atrocity, not implying that the iraq war is the biggest tragedy in history.
again, cut the "whiny liberal" bullshit. you can call it "whining" to get upset and emotional. i call it being a human being and actually giving a fuck about your fellow man. if you want to be a callous tough guy, more power to you. we'll see who leads a happier life and has more friends and loved ones, tough guy.
i'm not necessarily advocating pulling out instantly. basically, bush fucked us (i blame him because he ultimately had the power to take the hands out of his puppet ass and refuse to start that war), and now we're in a position where our options are limited, and it's basically a catch-22. but i think the least amount of descruction would come if we'd just put saddam back in power, pull the hell out, and kiss his ass and pay him off not to use biological warfare. maybe we'd be pussies if we did that, but i'm a pragmatist. if that solution wouldn't work, fine..let's choose another one. but right now we're continuing to have our asses handed to us because the goal of the administration is to not stop until we have established "stability" in the region, largely so we can tap into one of the last great sources of petroleum as we reach "peak oil", a concept i'll asssume you're familiar with.
we could find much better solutions to get out of iraq and save as many lives as possible, if we'd focus on helping the country and its citizens, instead of stealing their fucking oil and setting up another puppet government as we're known to do.
i don't have the answers, i'll admit. but i think it all begins with listening to the fucking generals (like shinseki back when he gave unheeded warnings), who actually have a fucking clue. they could try to perform their stated mission instead of going after oil.
once again you prove, with your picture, that you think atrocity negates atrocity. just keep thinking that. yeah, fuck trying to go after this president for sending us into a totally bullshit war and killing over a hundred thousand so far. let's just stop getting upste about it, because that's too "whiny".
actually, we liberals do have the moral high ground, because while dumb fuck republicans are raiding other nations for their resources, other republicans are choosing a president based upon his anti-gay-marriage sentiments, as if some other person's sex life is more important than hundreds of thousands of people's lives. we're donating time and resources to limiting the danger of this madman in office as much as possible. bono went after bush for failing to meet his pledges of aid to africa for fighting aids and poverty.
if you look around at any atrocity going on in the world, the people trying to help are mostly liberals, meanwhile republicans are content making good money and driving around their suvs as they spew more than their fair share of toxic substances into the atmosphere. republicans work to fuck workers over and take away their benefits, while liberals make things like osha.
so i'm not even sure what you mean when you say this is all political. why would i give a fuck about politics? why would i care at all about who is in office and what he's doing? just to have a side to cheer for? if that's t
no one's claiming god is impossible. it's possible that the middle of the moon is made of cheese. it's just not very likely, so it would be absurd to believe in it. we can accept it as a matter of fact that it's not true, because it's overwhealmingly unlikely, beyond reasonable doubt. i don't understand why people always want to bring the "p" word into this discussion.
you say a religion without faith is pointless. i say faith is pointless. faith is not observation or evidence. faith is meaningless. faith is believing with out regard to, or even in spite of, the facts. if you use faith, you might as well believe in 50-meter-tall pumpkins that walk around on legs.
oh my god!! i just saw one!!!
please don't bore me with the philosophical da da yadda yadda kant "my arm could just be a figment of my imagination" horse manure. those guys are taking it too far into purely speculative territory. yeah, i agree that we can't know much about the universe. i don't even believe it's possible for an object (or collection of objects) to "know" anything, including whether they exist. so i don't believe i can even know that i exist. maybe i do..maybe i don't. but that's outside the scope of this discussion, where we are at least assuming the universe is real..atoms are real..we can use isometric dating on fossils, etc. etc.
in a lot of ways i agree with that statement. kids need to learn to question more. don't just go buy a fucking magnetic bracelet because some fat bald rich guy on an infomercial is wearing it as he sweats like a pig and clumsily bats a tennis ball back to his staged opponent with a gleaming smiling smile on his face, and a little orbit gum style "chinggg" echoing down his throat.
oh, this is rich. my penis size?! are you fucking kidding me? how desperate, and gay, are you?
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i was using this war as but one example of the incalculable amount of suffering throughout the planet. i'm not going to list every atrocity that has happened or is happening, even though i'm sure that would still leave you room to make another naive and ignorant criticism of my position.
yours is the most pathetically stupid kind of stance on this kind of issue. you have this assinine idea that if a lot of atrocities are happening, one is less significant. i'm sorry i can't relate to that chimpanzee spin you're putting on things. you're the kind of person who needs to be stuck right in the middle of the guts and gore to fight for your life, as you crouch in tears and wet your pants, so you can see how "petty" war is.
are you trying to knock the idea of an emotional reaction to a fucking war that we caused!? you're damned right i get emotional about this, and if i could punch the whole bush administration in their mouths one by one, and get away with it, you'd better believe i would. i'm proud of these emotions.
don't spout off this played out "whiney liberal" schpiel that you copped off sean hannity, you wannabe. do you really think that it's hurting our progress to get angry and march against the war, write our senators and congressman, and demand answers? what do you suggest--inaction? should we just toughen up and get more cynical like you? yeah, that would be productive, i'm sure.
you need to stop for a second and get your head out of your ass. yes, there are huge problems in the world, like global warming, which will ultimately probably cause more deaths than wars. that doesn't mean you just stand there twiddling your thumbs as we wage a war that was built on lies. you get angry, and do someting about it instead of being a little bitch, which is apparently what you suggest.
how about you sign up to go over to iraq and stand there in the line of fire, and we'll just see how long it takes you until you're standing there pissing down your leg and crying, "holy shit..i was wrong, this is a fucking big deal! please send me home sergeant..i miss my mommy and daddy."
get a clue and give up the tough guy act you big geek. i wonder whether this kid thinks the war is a big deal. http://www.islamonline.net/english/In_Depth/Iraq_
there's no such thing as "simple". maybe what you mean is "small" or "having fewer atoms".
well, it depends whether you have enough legoes for a whole house. but why are you talking about a house as opposed to any other arrangement of legoes?
actually it doesn't require html. that was just the default mode, which i'h now learning to enjoy, despite the fact that slashdot doesn't have gmail-style html editing.
as for the theme, going somewhere else won't change the theme on slashdot, now will it. i'm complaining about the theme on slashdot because it fucking sucks, and they said they were going to modernize it like two months ago. granted, the slashcode site they referred to still was ugly, but less ugly.
as i said, i didn't literally mean i fight "god". i fight the concept, and the belief. thus i don't understand why you are replying like this, as if i said i was literally "fighting the creator of the universe". although if god was real, i would love to kick his tail for letting our fucking idiot president kill 100,000 iraqis and 2000 jar heads.
no, mutations are observed. they are real. they happen.
well, let's see. you've got a document that is thousands of years old, was written by multiple people who we know very little about, contains numerous contradictions and historical/scientific errors, and overall has about the same credibility as a comic book. how rational and scientific of you. boy, how do i agrue with that, you genius.
time for me to put on my tinfoil hat. nice talkin with you, crazy guy.
ahh, but we're talking about god, not a pink unicorn. god is like the pink unicorn, in that neither is observed. but it is different, because there is nothing about the definition of "pink unicorn" that implies anything we can use probablistically.
but now suppose we asserted, "there is just one pink unicorn in existence, and it's favorite number is 4." now nevermind the probability that one even exists to begin with, because we can just take that for granted and shoot down this assertion out of improbability. even if this unicorn existed, the odds that 4 would be its fovarite number would be no greater than one divided by the number of numbers, or "approaching zero". thus we could have more certainty that this assertion was false than we could have certainty that earth is round. after all, none of us have been in a shuttle orbiting earth, and even an apparent view could be faked by advanced technology. mathematical arguments can be much more concrete.
in the case of god, i'm talking about a god that is all-powerful and intelligent, since these are two properties that almost everyone can agree must be a requisite of any meaningful definition of god. so even if an all-powerful being exists, which in and of itself is like saying an invisible pink unicorn exists, the odds that the particular set of algorithmic behaviors it exihibts would be intelligent are exceptionally low, because intelligence is inherently inprobable. as i said, go rearrange some code in a chess program and see how well it plays after that. so long deep blue, we just tried to make you more intelligent, but it went awry. pfft..
there's nothing wrong with being extremist about the right things. i'm extremely intolerant of rape for example.
or maybe people shouldn't name things after generic nouns. i don't call my dog "Dog" for example. i call him killerus maximus. bear in mind that you can't "hear" case in speech, which is how most people do the majority of their communication in a given day. so that argument of yours is pretty much shot down. and i don't want to be your friend--i want to be your teacher. as kanye west said, i'm taking ya'll to school.
riiiight. like a reference on slashdot forums will help out my band. pffft.
the facts and data are that mutations happen, and natural selection happens. chemicals mix about in the atmosphere, particularly in ware (e.g. the ocean). there is at least some realistic probability that these random natural processes brought about life as we see it. combine that with the fact that all life can be hierarchically arranged at the phenotypic and genotypic level (hierarchical, as in like a tree branching down without violating that pattern), as well as ages of genetic divergence congruently supported by both fossils and genetic data, and this explanation becomes far more than plausible.
now compare this to the odds that an intelligent entity created it. we don't know of any intelligent entities that would have been any more likely to have made it than these random processes, much more can explain the hierarchical structure of life or any other features of it (this is called falsifiability). this means that the evolutionary explanation is infinitely more likely than any intelligent explanations, because there are no intelligent explanations at all! so it is indeed that black and white.
A series of selection events to be sure, but stating that those events prove the entire evolutionary theory is a bit of an oversimplification.
no it's not. it's a matter of weighing the relative probabilities of all known potiental explanations. the only known potential explanation is natural unintelligent phenomena, as we do not know of any intelligent entities which could have, even in theory, caused the formation of life on earth.
Mutation events yes, but a new life form did not result. All of that is anecdotal evidence that does not prove evolution as a vehicle for life as we know it.
the thing that causes you to be different from a bird, is the particular sequence of dna rungs that were once in the fertilized egg that was you. were a particular series of mutations to have taken place at that time, you could have become an elephant, or a giraffe. there is a low, but greater-than-zero, probability that this could happen. it is a fact that genetic mutations can lead to a "new" life form, meaning simply a life form that is genetically different enough to be reproductively incompatible with another specified organism in its family tree.
this isn't "anectdotal" evidence. this fact.
morality has very well analyzed and publicized roots in natural selection. genes which cause an organism to help others around it, can be beneficial to their own perpetuation, because other organisms in proximity to the specified host will be likely to also carry that gene. this is especially true if the gene produces some sort of detectable feature, and tends to cause the behavior toward other members who also exhibit that feature. also, if you have two groups, x and y, and x has a gene that causes cooperative and altruistic behavior, whereas y causes directly selfish behavior, x will likely fare better than y. natural selection can select on the level of entire populations. you might be surprised to learn that darwin had already tackled this issue in the late 1800's: source
even if there were no conceivable means by which selective pressure would tend to select genes for altruism (or "morality" as you can generically refer to it), that wouldn't be a problem for modern evolutionary theory, as a series of mutations causing feelings of altruism could happen entirely at random, without "intermediate" selected steps. your problem here is that you, like so many i've debated for years and years online, have horrendous
thousands, if not millions, of people have died from religion and associated irrational hysteria. you can call me crazy for wanting to eradicate that if you want to. i'd call you crazy for not wanting to eradicate it.
i meant that i fight "god" as in the concept, and the belief, not the being. i think that goes without saying.
i do not support the use of two sets of the same letters, or "case sensitivity". i'd prefer all caps, but i know a lot of people say they find that hard to read. if you go to ahref=http://brokenladder.com/rel=url2html-3077ht
no gods are observed, so there's nothing to disprove. no god(s) has been supported to begin with. we can be overwhealmingly certain that the mutations are random, especially considering that we know what causes them, from carcinogens to copying errors, to radiation. the probability that these mutations were intelligent, and not random, is exceedingly small such that we can call the mutations random as a matter of fact beyond reasonable doubt.
no, most mutations are "neutral".
if your ideas run contrary to modern darwinian synthesis and/or evolution, or in support of intelligent design in any way, then yes they are groundless. if you haven't observed anything intelligent (ie "God") that could have, even in theory, created life, then you have absolutely no alternative, and no support for anything but unintelligent natural processes as the cause for life. any other belief system is groundless in full.
I'd venture that *you* have not observed evolution.
sure i have. i have consumed carcinogens, been exposed to radiation, seen a friend who died from cancer lying dead at the funeral, and seen a cat eat a mouse that didn't manage to evade danger. these are examples of mutation events and selection events, which are the processes that caused life to exist.
evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles within a population.
i've been reading this site since around 1997, but never signed up for the forums until recently. i hardly think the amount of time i've spent reading /. has anything to do with the validity of my point.
i remember reading an article last year about greasemonkey, and how a lot of people used it to do things like "make slashdot less ugly". face it dude, the site is ugly.
you're "contentless" baloney schpiel doesn't take into account the fact that the page could be made to look vastly better without affecting the content in anyway. The best way to help it would be to take out all of the green bars in the first place, and make it more minimalistic and legible. but the color scheme is so annoying it makes it hard to focus on the content. a LOT of peope agree with this, otherwise they woulddn't be going so far as to mess with how their browser displays it.
yours is a typical geek rant, because geeks are clueless about ui. they are notorious for it.
this is not correct. to quote the late stephen jay gould:
that's where you're wrong. i certainly do fight against theism, and irrational beliefs in general. i will fight it with my dying breath, even if it comes to burning down churches. you put me in power as dictator right now, i'll sterilize every last person i can find who has claimed theistic belief.