I don’t agree with that.
What? Are you saying that useful energy can’t be extracted from different wavelengths of light?
There is complex life living and extracting energy from the exhalations of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, effectively completely removed from the Sun as an energy source. They are known to host entire ecosystems that derive their nutrients and energy from primary producing chemolithoautotrophic prokaryotes which in turn provide the basis an entire food chain.
Which they haven’t. So you’re right when you say “none of this matters” to your pile of hypothetical what-ifs.
I agree. But that’s because there really are genuinely valid problems with the inference: It simply doesn’t solve the problem of a low probability of obtaining some set of constants “by chance”. It just pushes the fine-tuning over from the constants of physics to the desires of God to pick these constants. We’re still left with the same problem then. The odds of God’s desires out of all imaginable desires are infinitesimally low.
Just get over it already. This fine-tuning argument for the existence of God is actually crap when you look closer.
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Thanks, Eddie!
Not evidence. What some people say about it. Remember my request?
Again, what someone says, not evidence.
Again, what someone says, not evidence.
What @gpuccio says, not evidence.
And later, more specifically:
OK, Gil, now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s get into that evidence (not what gpuccio says).
They are with respect to fitness.
They are not random wrt location, but none ever have been.
Tell me what the evidence is for the mechanism for targeting the location. If you don’t know, tell me how an Intelligent Designer would do it.
Would it be specific or merely selective?
I don’t care. I care about evidence.
So let’s dig into that evidence together.
Of course actions are important; that does not negate the need for declaring one’s faith. Pitting action against faith, or counting it as an adequate replacement for faith, was never the traditional, orthodox Christian way, but it has become more common in the past century, as mainstream denominations have liberalized so much that in some congregations, and even for some clergy, not much of the “faith” part is left.
I was being sarcastic (not to you); I don’t agree with it, either.
No; multiverse proponents say there really are multiple universes, whereas my explanation of Denton was considering hypothetical possible universes, to illustrate Denton’s probabilistic thinking. And the words were mine, not Denton’s, so if I did not explain his position properly, he can’t be blamed.
But you just said you valued actions over words. If for ten years on two different blog sites, a person steadily argues as if he doesn’t think “the world was created by a wise and powerful God who cares for his creatures,” but says in passing two or three times that he’s a Christian (no specifics given), should we go by his words or by his deeds?
Sigh. The finest theoretical minds of the day – philosophers, theologians, physicists, from Fred Hoyle to the present – debate the significance of fine-tuning and whether it signifies any intelligent mind, and then one “Atheist Molecular Biology Technician” pronounces on a blog site that it’s “crap,” and everyone is supposed to roll over and die. That’s about par for the course here.
They are free to do so.
Nor have I heard any such reasons given by you. What is your real name again?
You haven’t demonstrated that you’re in any academic field whasoever; you need to provide evidence that you are. You’re merely a casually mendacious Culture Warrior hiding behind a pseudonym. I think that YOU need to be far more forthcoming before making any demands of others.
So there’s my question:
Only one of five things that Gil cited was evidence. What about you? Are you capable of citing a single datum?
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That seems to be your interpretation of what @Mercer has argued. I have seen him arguing against ID, but that is not at all the same thing.
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And the fact that those who advance them aren’t trying to find any testable hypotheses says it all.
I notice that purple photosynthetic bacteria use wavelengths quite different from those used by green plants. How does that affect Denton’s claim?
See this: Architecture and mechanism of the light-harvesting apparatus of purple bacteria
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[Eddie] You can’t possibly know unless you read, and prove to me that you have read, every word Denton has ever written. Denton’s vapid, fake seminar on YT doesn’t count! [/Eddie]
You know, that’s not really right. @Rumraket is of course right that it’s crap, and I have a hard time believing you don’t actually understand that he’s right. But the fact that it’s crap is demonstrated otherwise, as noted by @Mercer:
That’s it. The difference between a “this is a good inference because I say so” argument and a scientific, empirical hypothesis is that you can test the latter, and all you can do in support of the former is yell “It is SO a valid inference!”
If these things lead to insight, fine; let’s see the next steps. Let’s see the research program; let’s see the hypotheses; let’s see these ideas, which are very poorly developed, being explored. But it’s the old “question people versus answer people” dichotomy: the people who think these terrible inferences are actually good are “answer people,” who would rather have one bad answer than ten good questions. They do not know what it would look or feel like to say, “golly, I don’t know if the universe was designed, but I sure would like to see if there’s a way to find out.” Some of them may be acting in good faith, and merely be a bit dim; but some of them are not.
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No. I’ve been debating with him far longer than you, seven or more years on BioLogos and three or four here. It is not just that he argues against ID and YEC on scientific questions. It’s that whenever atheists and Christians clash on these sites, even over purely religious questions, he has never jumped in to take the part of Christianity against atheists. Yet Joshua has; Daniel Ang has; I believe Allen Witmer Miller has. And elsewhere, Ken Miller did, when Jerry Coyne made nasty noises against Francis Collins’s appointment. One can be strongly against ID and creationism, yet still a stout defender of Christianity when it’s being attacked. I’ve not seen any such defense from JAM. And I’ve never seen him affirm that he believes in:
or that the world was created by such a being.
As for me, I’ll affirm that I believe all of the above.
I don’t think I ever participated in BioLogos debates so I cannot comment on those.
I rarely see any “Christians against atheists” discussions here. But you do, and complain about it. Perhaps the problem is that you are seeing disagreements as Christians against atheists when the disagreement is really about something else.
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Right.
I am not talking about formal topics dedicated to Christianity vs. atheism. I’m talking about discussions on various other things during which Christian-atheist conflicts flare up. Sometimes it happens when the topic is Genealogical Adam; other times with other topics. If you haven’t noticed these, then either you don’t read as many of the discussions as I do, or you stop reading partway down, or you’re just not interested enough to pay attention when they come up.
No, that is not the problem. I can perfectly well distinguish between the case where people are disagreeing over a scientific matter, and the opponents happen to be Christians on one side and atheists on the other, and the case where Christianity has itself become the topic of discussion, and it is being criticized by atheists and defended by Christians. I can remember specific cases (though I can’t remember the titles of the columns) where Joshua and Daniel Ang rebutted atheist criticisms of Christian faith or theology or the Bible. Perhaps those did not catch your attention? I can remember when the now-departed George Brooks lamented the anti-Christian polemics that were so frequent, and I can remember George and I requesting a separate “compartment” of PS where specifically Christians could discuss science, origins and design, unimpeded by atheist/materialist flak. Perhaps you missed that discussion, too. And you can’t possibly read Puck’s posts with regularity without detecting an edge against Christianity and strong hints that atheists are smarter, more logical, and (like himself) less guided by prejudice than Christians (like Feser, Lewis, etc.). There are a number of statements with this “edge” in this very discussion. I think that your long-ago decision to abandon Christianity has made you less sensitive to criticisms of Christianity. And again, I’m not talking about untenable scientific views held by Christians; I’m talking about a strong sense that Christians aren’t very bright people, and have religious axes to grind that keep them from thinking straight (straight thinking being the way secular humanists think). If you can’t “feel” this coming across in a number of postings on this site, I would say that you are not very perceptive of the dynamics of human conversation.
Back when I was a rather devout Christian, I saw the early chapters of Genesis as allegorical; as myth rather than history. So, even back then, I would have seen discussions of geneological Adam as much ado about nothing. I’m not sure, but I have the impression that @Mercer sees it in that same way.
Yes, I remember George Brooks, and he did complain about Christian vs atheist arguments, much as you do. But I always thought he was complaining too much.
Some of the disagreements here are socially conservative vs. socially liberal. I count you as a social conservative and @Mercer as a social liberal. Back when I was a devout Christian, I was a social liberal. I actually am of the opinion that social conservatives have gotten Christianity wrong. And yes, I do notice that atheists tend to be more socially liberal. So perhaps that’s where you are seeing atheist vs. Christian argumentation, while I am seeing the disagreement as about something else.
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Why would an omnipotent, transcendent being need to design three different flagella? And why do the people obsessed with viewing Him as some sort of tinkerer keep pushing the deception that He only designed one?
I’ve pointed out many times that IDcreationism is ridiculous theology because it diminishes God by trying to squeeze Him into ever-smaller gaps, so I’m not seeing much omnipotence and transcendence in your idea of God. You’re turning Him into a tinkerer; I refuse to do so.
Which is utterly meaningless because you haven’t told us who you are. Do you not see the absurdity in making demands of others while you use a pseudonym?
No, you really can’t, just as you falsely accused me of being wrong about Meyer’s craven lie about the ribosome when you had no clue what you were talking about. It’s all about sides, as you let slip there. Truth and evidence simply don’t matter in your binary Culture War.
Well, what’s perfectly clear for everyone to see is that Eddie views himself as the final arbiter of who belongs in which camp.
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Thank you for acknowledging I’m not making it all up.
Yes, true. But again, having studied both theology and political philosophy, I’m quite capable of distinguishing between the arguments that are about one and the arguments that are about the other.
This is probably correct, unless by “social conservative” you have in mind activist groups such as The Moral Majority or the like. I’m a classic conservative, of the type Puck referred to (that’s the only area where we seem to agree on anything), and my conservatism is more European than American. My heroes aren’t American social conservatives, they’re mostly pre-modern European thinkers, who are quite different from Bible Belters – much more philosophical. And when I do read modern conservatives, they tend to be scholars and philosophers such as Allan Bloom and Roger Scruton.
I agree that they have got Christianity wrong on some things, but not all. To the extent that some of them wish to enforce Christian views on the population, they have Christianity wrong. Christian faith and life must be freely adopted to be of any spiritual value. But they aren’t wrong to worry about the moral and spiritual dangers of certain new reproductive technologies, and they aren’t wrong to be critical of the more radical forms of “gender” theory, and they aren’t wrong on some other things. They are wrong to blindly endorse Donald Trump, when they know that his church attendance is almost nonexistent and that his Christian faith is also likely nonexistent. They should know that he is just using their support to further his personal ambitions. They should all have used their immense power of numbers to elect a more moderate and also genuinely Christian Republican leader. But a certain deformity in US culture has created an unholy alliance between secular right-wingers and conservative evangelicals. It’s bad for America and bad for Christianity. But the alternative is voting for people like Hillary Clinton. There is no way out, unless somehow a third party can emerge to break the extreme polarization by providing a centrist option. But we’ve already discussed that.
I agree on the first sentence, but not on the second. There is no doubt that in the crossfire on this site, science, religion and politics sometimes get muddled. I have from time to time opposed statements here with a leftist agenda, but when I do that, I’m opposing them because they are leftist, not because the person is atheist – though sometimes it is hard to separate the two when the motivation for certain leftist policies seems connected with the atheism.
Your concern with revealing names is total hypocrisy, when you concealed who you were for years on BioLogos, TalkOrigins and elsewhere. And when you haven’t complained that Wikipedia authors haven’t told us who they are, and when you haven’t complained that Argon hasn’t told us who he is, etc.
Your complaint is also logically invalid, since I can state what I believe without stating who I am. And so could you have done, back on BioLogos.
The deflection to others will not work. You’re still avoiding saying what you believe about God. Never mind whether others’ belief is inadequate, inconsistent, etc. Just be straight up about your own.
The only thing that’s perfectly clear is that you have once again refused to state clearly and unambiguously what you believe, and tried to cover up the avoidance by going on the attack.
You were not asked about “ID creationism.” You were asked whether you personally believed that the world was created by:
You have heard the opinion of John Harshman that such a belief would require “extraordinary evidence.” So do you hold that belief, and if so, what is the “extraordinary evidence” that causes you to do so?
Credit where credit is due. Eddie is correct on this. As an outside observer who has only ever looked at the US from the other side of the Niagara (and with no plans ever to visit), this has seemed the essential problem since (and I suspect before) I became aware of the US culture war in 2005. The unholy alliance frayed a bit with the Kansas vote. Maybe situations can be repulsive enough to galvanize opposition before it’s too late.
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That is rather a big “if” - and if you go digging for every possible “coincidence” there is, it becomes increasingly unlikely. And including “coincidences” that aren’t really coincidences isn’t going to help.
E.g
Is the ozone protection a genuine coincidence? Isn’t a product of life rather than a prerequisite for it?
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