Sam Vimes wrote: » The theory of evolution is the support for chance producing us. If you don't think it was chance, if you think God was involved, then you don't believe in evolution
There is no such thing as guided chance. If you think about it for a second it doesn't even make sense. It's like picking a card from a stacked deck. Chance is negated if the process was guided. Whether God guided it to produce humans exactly or just to produce some beings that could fulfil his plan, it's still intelligent design and not evolution
Yes we can, that's the whole point of evolution and we can give fossil and DNA evidence for many of the steps along the way, each stage of which can be produced from the last through random genetic mutations guided by natural selection
antiskeptic wrote: » See my response to Wicknight above. Stripping out chances ability to produce no result ('us' being a result) is an area for potential involvement on Gods part.
antiskeptic wrote: » We can't know whether naturalistic chance will produce us because we don't know whether naturalistic chance is what's at work. If it's not then that isn't what produced us. Is naturalistic chance at work? And if so, how do you tell?
Sam Vimes wrote: » You tell by studying the mountains and mountains of evidence. And when you have completed your study you arrive at the theory of evolution, which states that life evolved through random genetic mutations guided by natural selection and does not require God at any stage.
If you study the evidence and you find that you have no way of knowing if God was involved because it could have happened without his involvement then in reality the only reason God is even being mentioned is because you like to think he was involved and not because there is anything to suggest he was. That's not how science works I'm afraid, you have to provide evidence of a claim and saying "you can't prove he wasn't involved" doesn't cut it
antiskeptic wrote: » Study can't inform you whether or not naturalistic chance is that which is at work. A theory might suppose that mutations are random/directionless but how would it go about deciding that - as opposed to a mechanism in which certain mutations are excluded from occuring under particular circumstances? You're in the same boat - and science isn't going to help you out. You have a philosophical foundation which assumes naturalistic chance at work when you have no way of telling that this is so. Ockhams Razor is no use because we can't say whether a naturalistic chance environment is a simpler system to one in which God reigns. For the simple reason that we haven't got a clear cut naturalistic environment available to us to see how well it would perform vs. one over which God reigns.
Morbert wrote: » Ockham's razor advises us not to "multiply entities/explanations unnecessarily", so we could employ it here. How? We know that natural selection of random mutation is capable of generating the complexity and function of life. We have both a plausible process and evidence which shows that such a process is at work. To say that there is also a subtle guiding force working in addition to natural selection is to add something which isn't necessary. Now this doesn't mean we can say that there isn't a guiding force, but it does mean we aren't compelled to assume there is one.
marco_polo wrote: » But don't those explainations imply a deterministic universe?
/ *Carefully covers free will trap with leaves
antiskeptic wrote: » If you've been following the train of thought these last few posts you'll appreciate a point made that random mutation from a God-cut deck of possible mutations is still random mutation. From which some are naturally selected. We would not be adding unnecessary entities if it necessitated Gods stripping a naturalistic deck of inopportune mutational possibilities in order to arrive at the situation we find ourselves in today. We can't, as I say, decide naturalistic chance is capable of bringing about the current scenario for want of a way of knowing we are looking at naturalistic chance at work. And so can't really be all that sure about what constitutes "necessity" ps: given that William of Ockham was a Christian monk, I think it unlikely that his razor can be wielded as you wield it.
antiskeptic wrote: » Study can't inform you whether or not naturalistic chance is that which is at work. A theory might suppose that mutations are random/directionless but how would it go about deciding that - as opposed to a mechanism in which certain mutations are excluded from occuring under particular circumstances?
antiskeptic wrote: » You're in the same boat - and science isn't going to help you out. You have a philosophical foundation which assumes naturalistic chance at work when you have no way of telling that this is so. Ockhams Razor is no use because we can't say whether a naturalistic chance environment is a simpler system to one in which God reigns. For the simple reason that we haven't got a clear cut naturalistic environment available to us to see how well it would perform vs. one over which God reigns.
antiskeptic wrote: » We would not be adding unnecessary entities if it necessitated Gods stripping a naturalistic deck of inopportune mutational possibilities in order to arrive at the situation we find ourselves in today.
antiskeptic wrote: » We can't, as I say, decide naturalistic chance is capable of bringing about the current scenario for want of a way of knowing we are looking at naturalistic chance at work.
antiskeptic wrote: » ps: given that William of Ockham was a Christian monk, I think it unlikely that his razor can be wielded as you wield it.
Sam Vimes wrote: » Natural selection guided by whatever happens to be in the prevailing environment, not by God. If someone thinks that evolution was in any way guided to facilitate the formation of the human genome, what they believe in is not evolution
Fanny Cradock wrote: » It seems to me (and that's not to say my observation is correct) that there are two lines of thought within theistic evolution (including maybe a fudge between the two). Those whould believe that evolution continues undisturbed until God decides to interviene in some limited way. And those who think there there is no interaction in the evolution process, meaning that "mankind" could have take any form if it was run all over again. The first line of thought seems very close to the sitiuation domesticated animals and cultivars find themselves in. For example, presumably one doesn't believe that the dog is somehow not, or never will be, subject to evolution because we have apparently bent its evolutinary course to meet our ends and we have ostensibly guided the unguided (at least over the merest fraction of time ).
Fanny Cradock wrote: » The second line of thought - where God merely set the whole thing in motion and stepped back - should remove any objections along the lines of "theistic evolution is not 'real' evolution". However, it does raise some interesting, but nevertheless tricky, theological and ontological questions. I would lean towards the first line.
antiskeptic wrote: » Suppose chance on it's own can produce 100 different outcomes. And suppose that 50 of those outcomes have no suitability for Gods purposes. So he strips out the possibility of those useless 50 outcomes. And leaves chance to produce one of the remaining 50 (potentially useful to him) outcomes - by the same process of evolution that you hold to.
antiskeptic wrote: » That's not intelligent design. It's limiting the boundaries of chance. Unless your supposing intelligent design by way of random mutation and survival of the fittest.
antiskeptic wrote: » You're in the same boat - and science isn't going to help you out. You have a philosophical foundation which assumes naturalistic chance at work when you have no way of telling that this is so.
antiskeptic wrote: » Ockhams Razor is no use because we can't say whether a naturalistic chance environment is a simpler system to one in which God reigns.
antiskeptic wrote: » For the simple reason that we haven't got a clear cut naturalistic environment available to us to see how well it would perform vs. one over which God reigns.
antiskeptic wrote: » I don't see how stripping a deck from 52 cards (representing the total sum of possible naturalistic outcomes) to 42 cards (the total sum of possible satisfactory-to-Gods-purposes outcomes) determines the card eventually picked.
antiskeptic wrote: » How God manages to create a will free from God-determined choice is a mystery. It's the kind of thing you're better off taking as a given and getting on with the various consequences involved - rather than allow yourself to come to an unbelieving halt over.
PDN wrote: » While I have no problem if Adam & Eve were black, white or blue - I fail to see the logic of what you're saying. Just because Africans are mainly black today it doesn't follow that the original ancestors of all races were also black.
antiskeptic wrote: Study can't inform you whether or not naturalistic chance is that which is at work. A theory might suppose that mutations are random/directionless but how would it go about deciding that - as opposed to a mechanism in which certain mutations are excluded from occuring under particular circumstances? Sam Vimes wrote: » Occams razor says that you should not multiply entities unnecessarily, ie if you can explain something with A and B that is preferable to explaining it using A, B and C. We can explain it with A) random mutation and B)natural selection making C) God an unnecessary entity
Sam Vimes wrote: » Occams razor says that you should not multiply entities unnecessarily, ie if you can explain something with A and B that is preferable to explaining it using A, B and C. We can explain it with A) random mutation and B)natural selection making C) God an unnecessary entity
We know from studying evolution that any number of other combinations could have happened. We know that non-intelligent life is not prevented because there are billions of non-intelligent life forms. That means that God would have to intervene in a way that goes beyond the laws of physics to overrule natural selection and change it to divine selection. That is intelligent design, because an intelligent being would be directly influencing the form that life would take in order to reach a conscious goal. And that's not evolution
Mark Hamill wrote: » So what you're saying is that god intelligently designs the universe so that there is no chance for any outcome other than what he actually wants, but that this is still evolution?
I think you are looking at this all wrong. There is only two types of outcome: Those god want and Those god doesn't want. It doesn't matter if there are ninety nine individual outcomes that god would find acceptable and only one which he wouldn't, they still fall into two categories. If god removes all chance for one category, then he is designing reality so that only one type of outcome is possible, thus intelligent design.
Mark Hamill wrote: » Well if those particular circumstances are supposed to be"intelligent design" then you just have to show the lack of intelligence in the "design". Things like the odd "choices" of which systems are redundant in a body, the structure of the eye, pointlessly long nerves in the neck of giraffes all go to refuting the idea that any creature was designed by something intelligent.
I just showed you above how you show naturalistic chance is at work-just show the that there is no intelligence, just blind chance.
Considering people still can't define god, I would have say a naturalistic chance enviroment is simpler than one ruled by god.
But you also havent got a clear cut enviroment ruled by your god to see how well it would perform vs. one over which Allah reigns, or one which Vishnu reigns, or Zenu or Ra or Odin etc.
Sam Vimes wrote: » Exactly. Anything that you think suggests there is a God is lauded and anything that suggests otherwise is a 'mystery'. This is what's known as confirmation bias.
antiskeptic wrote: » My apologies for the delay in replying. The last part of your response is the piece which most directly addresses the objection raised: how do you know naturalistic chance is that which is at work? It might be helpful to rephrase this objection in the light of Occams Razor being wheeled out if I were to ask you: how do you know that what you see around you now is "fittest"? That is to say; random mutation + natural selection would, were they the only mechanisms operating, produce a result about which it could be said "that which has survived is fittest". But to suppose we (for example) are fittest because we are surviving is to engage in circular reasoning (if trying to argue rm+ns only to be operating). You assuming part of which you're trying to demonstrate in other words.
Many species have a nerve that comes out of their brain and down their neck, which then splits into two. One part continues to the heart (I think it was) then the other part goes back into the head. In most animals this is fine because the nerve is only about 6 inches long but a giraffe also has this nerve, which runs all the way down its neck and then all the way back up. It travels about 8 feet to get to a point 3 inches from where it started. In fish where this nerve originated it was fine but in a Giraffe it's a terribly inefficient design. If an engineer was designing it, he would realise this, go back to drawing board and move the nerve to the more efficient place. But evolution can't go back to the drawing board because it has no foresight. Instead it gradually lengthened the nerve over millions of years because it has no way of knowing that rewiring it would be more efficient and it had no intelligence guiding it to do so. This inefficiency in the body of a giraffe and in millions of other animals is not what you would expect from an intelligent designer but it's exactly what you'd expect from a non-intelligent process that gradually changes and only "knows" it's got something wrong because nature kills it and doesn't allow it to reproduce to pass on it's "wrong" variations. Luckily for giraffes, this inefficiency was not bad enough for its ancestors to be wiped out by predators but the dodo, who gradually lost the ability to fly because it didn't need it as it had no natural predators - until man arrived - was not so lucky
antiskeptic wrote: » The number of combinations possible in a naturalistic environment is finite. The number of possible combinations in a God stripped deck is less than the above figure and finite. The deck stripping would have to do with design as limiting the designs possible. Evolution isn't so much concerned with the starting conditions leading to the result as it is the mechanism by which the result is achieved given starting conditions.
Mark Hamill wrote: » It determines that the card eventually picked is satisfactory to god.
Yes, instead of examining a claim that seems to show a contradiction in the whole god idea, just ignore it and stay a believer :rolleyes:
antiskeptic wrote: » (the theist has the advantage in that it is a logical and rational possiblity for him to know that God exists whereas the atheist can never know God doesn't. Such a theist has as much use for confirmation bias regarding the existance of God as the orbiting astronaut has in convincing himself that the earth is round.)
antiskeptic wrote: » Which is not the same as determing the card picked.
antiskeptic wrote: » It's not possible to contradict the whole god idea by admitting that human (I repeat human) level intelligence operating in a time/space environment encounters mystery.
Sam Vimes wrote: » Evolution isn't perfect and what survives often is not the fittest. It's not so much the complexity and efficiencies in animals that indicate for random mutations naturally selected as the inefficiencies and legacy features that no intelligent designer would think of putting in. An example I've given before from the Channel 4 show Inside Nature's Giants
Also, we can't know for sure that it's only nature driving it because if it was driven by God it wouldn't necessarily look any different but since it can be completely explained by nature driving it...
I see no reason to suppose that God was driving it.....unless my religious beliefs require that he drove it and my preconceived world view collapses if he didn't. That's not how science works, no ideas are sacred and any idea, no matter how well established, will be dropped if the evidence suggests it's not true or in this case that it's unnecessary
And my point is that that theory is not evolution, it's intelligent design. It's the teleological argument, the belief that God "fine tuned the universe for life", which I have covered at length in this forum. Basically it's a form of confirmation bias where you look at the tiny bit of evidence that might suggest fine tuning and ignore the vast amounts that suggest nothing of the sort. If the laws of the universe were fine tuned for life, there would not be trillions upon trillions of galaxies of pointless, lifeless planets and stars. Far from being the main purpose, life appears to be a freak accident, a by-product of a universe that otherwise chugs along quite nicely without it. The argument also fails because it assumes that this is the only kind of life that can exist. The laws of the universe are such that they support this kind of life (very very rarely). If the universe had different laws it's entirely possible that a completely different and incompatible kind of life would have evolved. If such a thing had happened the glaxions with 17 eyes and mercury in their veins (assuming they had eyes and veins and assuming that mercury could exist) would be sitting on their 6 dimensional planet under their purple cuboidal sun and remarking how the universe seems so precisely designed for them. The universe did not adapt for life, life adapted for the universe.
antiskeptic wrote: » You can't know for sure that it's only nature driving it because you don't know what only nature driving it is capable of producing on it's own. This, for want of having a card-carrying God-free nature whose products you can examine.
antiskeptic wrote: » You look at the products of evolution, suppose them produced naturalistically (assumption) and then apply Occams Razor to trim off elements whose influence has been rendered unnecessary by that assumption.
antiskeptic wrote: » Remember that I'm arguing from the (potential) position of a theistic evolutionist - which would have me consider God to arrive at his goal via a process of evolution. That God might strip the deck of cards, which would result in an outcome which doesn't suit his purposes, is a far cry from supposing he need strive for perfection in mechanical design. An apparent goal of God is to give every man a balanced choice w.r.t. to mans eternal relationship with God. With or without God: that is the question (to put it crudely). In stage setting the realm in which this choice is made (which includes this time/space/earth environment of ours) there must be as much effort given by God to enabling a 'no' vote as there is in enabling a 'yes' vote - if balance in our choice is to be maintained. For someone who is travelling the 'no' vote path, intellectual satisfaction for their choice need be supplied by God if that choice is to be maintained. Inside Natures Giants (and naturalistic evolution at large) is, I feel, part of that intellectual support. Enabled by God for those whose choice is currently 'no'. Some would cry foul that God would disguise himself so. But that's what balanced choice requires.
antiskeptic wrote: » The evolutionary scenario isn't concerned with the starting conditions which determine the number of potential outcomes. It's concerned with the mechanism whereby the outcome is achieved.
