Can God be a useful "scientific" hypothesis? Yes

Materialism has nothing to do with whether information is an abstraction.

That’s about the incarnation, not about God. When one of his three persons was actually human, sure, that person was to some degree constrained by humanness (though not completely; humans can’t turn water into wine, etc.). But That was only for 30 years or so in eternity. Also note that John’s theology doesn’t fit comfortably with the rest of the bible. Still irrelevant.

No, I was asking for an explicit statement that you had read the paper. Had you? Just curious.

How is that relevant to any claim you made? Mind you, most of your claims are incoherent and/or mutually contradictory. So it would be good if you would follow this procedure: 1) state a claim (clearly, one hopes), 2) provide the citation and evidence to support the claim, and 3) explain how the evidence supports the claim in #1.

Examples do not help when the claim itself is incoherent. You seem very confused about the differences among individuals, species, and ecosystems, for one thing. Your initial claim was about individuals within populations. You seem to have moved from that to the entire worldwide ecosystem in at least one case. Did you even notice?

I’ll just repeat this, which you have twice ignored: the Permo-Triassic extinction can’t possibly be fit into your scenario. Will you ignore that thrice before the cock crows?

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From my perspective, it seems more likely that you misunderstood me. Or perhaps we are mutually misunderstanding each other.

I watched the first 12 minutes.

Actually, I watched the whole thing. The second half was chock full of the name dropping and appeals to authority that are so common in Christian apologetics.

I’m not opposed to the idea that the world we see might be emergent from some more fundamental stuff. But if that is the case, then science is about the world that emerged, rather than about the more fundamental stuff. And information is also about the world that emerged rather than about the more fundamental stuff. So information cannot itself be the fundamental stuff.

And sorry, but quantum consciousness is still absurd.

It should be trivially obvious that it does not presuppose materialism. That’s one of the indicators that you are misunderstanding what I wrote.

This looks like a misunderstanding of “random”. That the mutation rate has been optimized would not make it non-random. It would only mean that it does not follow a uniform probability distribution.

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Yes, I think we did misunderstand each other. I was referring to realism when I accused you of presupposing materialism while you were presupposing Methodogical naturalism. With that said, it’s still presupposing materialism regardless because emerging science is clearly showing how quantum consicousness plays a fundamental role in affecting reality whether you think its absurd or not.

Again, you are clearly presupposing materialism in the context of methodological naturalism when you say things like "I suppose I should take you as insisting that God is a useful fiction. Perhaps that makes you an atheist”

I know. That was not where I was going with that. I never said non-random means optimization.

I am not sure how your response shows that God cannot be constrained in science if we are talking about a personal God, especially in light of Genesis 1:24 or Romans 1: 19-20:

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”

As I explained before, God cannot create and develop a world that does not have God intimately involved in the process every step of the way because it would conflict with his “Personal’ nature. More importantly, previous experiments and observations suggest that God mimics the behavior of humans rather than Natural law.

Lastly, as I told @Tim, God’s actions would only be unconstrained in regards to his relationship with mankind NOT with his relationship with nature and the animal kingdom.

I am not sure what you are getting at then. This probably does not matter in the grand scheme of things anyways.

Sure, let me make some changes to be more clear to get back on track and on the same page:

A Divine intelligence formed the first life and the anatomical structures of multicellular life from the physical-chemical world and continues to maintain [populations] by ensuring they fit the environments they occupy to survive, reproduce, and fill the biosphere.

.

Here, you have conflated “humanness” with “science” for some inexplicable reason, and have followed it up with a text that appeals to his eternal power and divine nature, and which likewise has nothing to do with constraint or with any other claim you make. Non sequiturs are not arguments or evidence.

There are no such observations.

I’m just trying to find out if you have actually read any of the things you cite. Previous experience suggests that the answer is usually “no”.

That is by no means more clear, and it still seems to be falsified by any extinction of any species. Permo-Triassic!

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Consciousness is a phenomenon, not a mechanism.

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I don’t actually presuppose methodological naturalism.

False.

I have been studying human cognition and consciousness for 30 years. I do know something about the field. No, nothing in science is clearly showing that quantum consciousness is relevant.

Yes, some scientists are of the opinion that the evidence points to quantum consciousness. But that’s far weaker than “clearly showing.” They are entitled to their opinion, and you are entitled to agree with them, just as I am entitled to disagree. But don’t exaggerate with that “clearly showing” nonsense.

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@Meerkat_SK5: bald unsubstantiated assertions are generally “NOT” highly regarded on this forum.

There seems to be little in the theology involved that would outright prohibit its application to the animal kingdom, and I have in fact read at least one article discussing the consequences of applying Theodicy there.

Is your claim that no pain and suffering exists in “nature and the animal kingdom” and that God’s relationship with them is perfectly explicable?

Finally, even if this theology only relates to “God’s relationship with mankind”, it still eliminates your purported constraints as they apply to mankind.

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As I explained before, there are 5 known explanations for DNA/RNA. An alien designer, an unconscious quantum computer, natural law, time-traveling humans, and God.

It can’t be humans for obvious reasons, but it can’t be the known laws of physics and chemistry either because they only produce analog information while digital information has only come from minds;

It can’t be a quantum computer because RNA experiments suggest it requires a conscious observer to obtain positive results (more on this later);

it can’t be an alien designer because the genome and genetic text is mathematically identical to human language, which suggests that there is a relation between us and this agent.

Thus, this not only leaves us with God as being the best possible explanation, but these observations suggests that God probably mimics our behavior in creating and developing designs in nature.
I look forward to your objections.

Let me ask you this… are you basing your objection on how you are defining species? Because I don’t think we can determine whether this would conflict with the hypothesis under this topic since it does not deal with what would be considered a species under a common design model which I don’t think would be the same thing in the long run. There is also the possibility that there is a positive hidden function for extinction events we might find in the future, which would show how the hypothesis can be useful even though it may not be fully worked out.

NO, it is a mechanism according to quantum mind theory. Please watch the video I gave you or look into the references.

Well, I don’t know what you mean by “far weaker” but it is certainly not absurd based on the current evidence for it.

For instance, although only 6 out of 20 predictions have been confirmed for Orch-OR theory, most of the 14 other predictions survived falsification from testing ( this is not including all the confirmed predictions on the other quantum mind models). According to Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle, a theory is truly confirmed when it has survived falsification. More importantly, materialism in general has been so thoroughly disconfirmed that there is a consensus on this as well, which means materialistic assumptions would not have preferred status in this situation and may even violate Occam’s razor.

There has yet to be a claim I made that I have not attempted to support.

No, my claim is that we should find more examples of positive function for these sinister designs that seem to only bring harm and degeneration upon that organism or to other organisms.

If you want examples, just ask.

If you are talking about after mankind is created, then maybe. But, we have the bible to use as a guiding post instead at that point and ,thus, I don’t think this would be a problem.

As I explained before, this is word salad, and it doesn’t make any sort of point. You’re just repeating your words, and this is Einstein’s definition of insanity.

My objection is that none of this makes even surface sense. Here’s my argument: Purple walrus and dozy doats and liddle lambzy divey, and therefore monkey yogurt. And that makes just as much sense as you do.

No. And what follows is more word salad. It’s impossible to discuss anything with you. You are not in control of your sentences or your meaning or your understanding. Potato!

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I see it as absurd. That’s an opinion. I have not suggested that it has been clearly shown to be absurd.

Do you have a reference for that? It doesn’t seem to be anything I would have expected Popper to say. In any case, many philosophers of science reject Popper’s falsificationism. They still expect hypotheses to be falsifiable, but they do not expect that of theories.

Do you have a reference for that? To me, materialism does not state anything precise enough that it could be confirmed or disconfirmed.

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Balderdash!

You have not supported your claim that:

In fact you carefully avoided addressing my point that:

It can’t be humans for obvious reasons, but it can’t be the known laws of physics and chemistry either because they only produce analog information while digital information has only come from minds;

Citation please.

It can’t be a quantum computer because RNA experiments suggest it requires a conscious observer to obtain positive results (more on this later);

Citation please.

it can’t be an alien designer because the genome and genetic text is mathematically identical to human language, which suggests that there is a relation between us and this agent.

Citation please.

You keep making unsubstantiated claims without evidence. There is no particular reason to think digital information only

It does.

You said God behaves like a human.

A human would not design humans with a broken vitamin C gene so that we get scurvy, or a broken uricase gene so that we get gout.

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If it can then why hasn’t it yet?

Oh my, now you are also clueless on what evolutionary biologists mean by “random mutations”. Mutations occur randomly and non-randomly, but both terms have different meanings.

Mutations are random or spontaneous in the sense that their occurrence is independent of the consequences on fitness of organisms. In other words, mutations occur regardless of whether they are useful or not to an organism. For example, some bacterial populations in your gut may have mutations that confer antibiotic resistance, but those mutations would be useless if the said bacterial population is not under some sort of selective pressure due to antibiotics exposure.

Mutations are nonrandom in the sense that the different types don’t have similar probabilities of occurring. In other words, some mutations are more or less likely to occur than others. For example, its more likely for a point mutation to occur than a gene duplication. For point mutations, its more likely for a transition (purine [A] to purine [G] or pyrimidine [C] to pyrimidine [T]) mutation to occur than a transversion (purine [A, G] to pyrimidine [C,T]) mutation. A truly random process would generate outputs with equal or extremely similar frequencies, but this is not what we see in the case of mutation frequencies.

Thus, whether mutation rates are optimized or not, mutations are still random as defined above.

The first paper you cited offered an odd definition of non-random mutations, which I think is incorrect:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10995#citeas

I think the above definition is wrong because it is really talking about the fixation of new mutations not their non-randomness. Mutations occur regardless of whether they are adaptive, neutral or deleterious, but their fixation may depend on the aforementioned fitness effects. If a mutation is adaptive, its chances of being fixed in a population by selection are very high, so it may rise to high frequencies until its fixed and vice versa for a deleterious mutation. Neutral mutations have little or no effect on fitness, so they could be lost or fixed by genetic drift. The paper later goes on to admit this (seemingly inadvertently) as shown here:

Emphases mine. The bold shows the inadvertent admission that they are really talking about the rate of fixation of new mutations not the rate at which they occur.

You also seem to think that optimized mutation rates always reduce the risk of acquiring deleterious mutations, but this is inaccurate, because we know of life forms that have optimized their mutation rates in ways that ramp up the frequency at which deleterious mutations appear in their population. An example is HIV which has optimized its mutation rate to be quite high, hence permitting a relatively rapid generation of mutants, many of which are evolutionary dead ends due to possessing deleterious mutations.

How do you know (with empirical evidence) there was any such goal of creating living things? More so, if the goal of the creation and development of life forms has been achieved, kindly explain the contradictory observation that life forms are still evolving?

More importantly, you have not laid out any experimental procedure to test your ill-defined God hypothesis. All you have done is list evolution experiments not designed to answer questions on the origin of life, because they can’t.

You say you “know”, but you still go ahead to repeat the same mistake. Clown. Lenski’s LTEE simulates microbial evolution (although its findings still largely apply to non-microbes) in the wild, while PACE simulates evolution by natural selection. Neither of them simulate past events, and they are also not useful to OoL research which is connected to what you mean by “past events”.

This is false and clearly indicates you misunderstand how PACE experiments are done. Read:

With PACE, researchers just choose the selective pressure, while the phages do all the hardwork: only phages that express the protein of interest (POI) successfully propagate; phages that express mutants of the POI with enhanced activity will have higher fitness than those with POIs of lower activity.

The part in bold is false. The phages are given the pIII protein, not “to give it a boost function and fitness” but to enable them complete maturation. This is done because the researchers replace the gIII gene (which encodes pIII) with their protein of interest, which automatically impedes the phage’s life cycle. The phage’s life cycle (vital for the experiment to be successful) is restarted by providing the gene product of gIII contained in a plasmid inserted into the host E . coli cells.

Is this unnatural? Heck no. All viruses lack what it takes to fully carry out their own replication, thus, they depend on the some parts of the replicative machinery of their host just as the PACE phages depend on the gIII positive plasmids inserted to their bacterial hosts by researchers for complete maturation.

In addition, the randomness of mutations is extremely well-supported and evolutionary experiments have worked extremely well with that evidence-based view. Your misunderstanding of what random means is responsible for this misinformed comment of yours.

For a better understanding of how PACE works, see this article (I took the above quote on the advantage of PACE relative to other methods of directed evolution from it):

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.0c03508

This is not surprising and is consistent with the way nature operates.

Correcting you is time-consuming, so If I don’t see improvements in future comments, then I am done with our conversation.

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Pedant mode:

This isn’t true. A truly random process can generate outputs with different frequencies.

Rolling a dice generates 1,2,3,4,5 or 6 with equal frequency, and meets your definition of truly random. Rolling two dice generates 7 more often than any other number, but doesn’t meet your definition.

How can rolling one die be truly random, but rolling two dice not be?

Radioactive decay is considered to be random, but some isotopes (e.g. Bismuth 213) decay to two different isotopes with different frequencies.

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I guess I expressed that badly, assuming everyone would catch on. I was really trying to illustrate the influence of bias on the probability of occurrence for each mutation type.

There are many mutation types to pick from or sample, so if this picking is done at random (in the absence of bias), each mutation type will have an equal probability of being detected, hence a uniform probability distribution will be observed. However, the probability distribution of each mutation type under some classification scheme tends to be nonuniform, due to certain molecular biases. I regarded this biased sampling of possible mutations as non-random. Any better?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the second dice is the bias that favours the occurrence of 7. With two die, the number of times we can get seven is higher relative to other numbers. If this is the case then it fits my definition of nonrandom, where bias influences the sampling of possible values or events.

Radioactivity decay is random or spontaneous in the sense that we can’t predict which individual atoms will decay. I don’t think this has anything to do with output frequency.

The decay chain of Bismuth 213 terminates in Bismuth 209, not “two different isotopes with different frequencies”.

Not really. It’s not non-random.

Then by your definition rolling one die is random, but rolling a second die is non-random. Using a random number to generate a number of random, but using it to generate a combination of two numbers is not. Rolling a symmetrical die is random, but rolling an asymmetrical die is non-random.

I think you’re wrong.

Oh dear. Bi-213 does decay to “two different isotopes with different frequencies”: Po-213 and Tl-209. That both those isotopes subsequently decay to Pb-209 (and then to Bi-209) doesn’t change that fact.

You’re wrong (at least for the standard statistical meaning of “bias”). The probability of 2 fair (i.e. unbiased) dice rolling a combination of 7 is 1 in 6 (36 permutations in total, 6 resulting in a 7 total: 1&6, 2&5 …). The probabilities of the next most probable totals, 6 & 8, is 5 in 36 (1&5, 2&4, etc; 2&6, 3&5, etc). The mean of this distribution is also 7, which is double the mean of the distribution of a single fair die (3.5), again proving that the distribution is unbiased.

Random does not necessarily mean that all outcomes are equally probable. Most random distributions of interest to the field of Statistics are not equi-probable.

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These discussions often get tied in knots because different people use different meanings of the word ‘random’.

I think it is best to avoid the term altogether and use the specific terms for whatever meaning it is you want to discuss: stochastic, equiprobable, or unguided.

Stochastic means that the value of a variable is not a single number but can fall in a range, typically defined as some or other probability distribution so that any particular outcome has a specific probability of happening (like the outcome of rolling 2 dice). Equiprobable is a subset of this where all possible outcomes have the same probability of occuring (like rolling a single die). ‘Unguided’ means, I guess, that there is no man behind the curtain secretly picking the value of the variable before the event even happens.

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Okay. So what do I call the unequal probabilities observed for the different types of mutations due to certain molecular constraints?

OK based on your comment and Tim’s, I apparently mangled the definition of non-random in statistics. So what’s the correct definition?