So this guy wrote an entire book that was based on his assessment of probability without doing a single probability calculation.
And you consider him to be a serious thinker?
So in your opinion the “finest minds” are only those who agree that fine-tuning = God? All the many thinkers who find the argument a load of codswallop are a bunch of lunkheads? Please clarify.
For that matter, what of the many organisms that live under conditions that would be instantly fatal to us big-brained apes. Extremophiles are only considered as such because they live under conditions that are conducive to few other lifeforms in our particular biosphere. One could easily imagine a planet teeming with life whose average environment is similar to that of a hydrothermal vent. And on such a planet there might well evolve a creationist who says “What are the odds of a planet with an average temperature of 400 degrees Celsius, the perfect temperature to sustain life?”
Did you need to do a probability calculation to determine that it was wildly improbable that our two grandmothers had all the characteristics I listed?
All you had to do was read what I wrote to know that your “paraphrase” was not what I was saying. Do you know what the English word “whether” means?
No; Denton’s whole point is that on such a planet a “creationist” would never evolve. If you read his books, you would know that. He is talking about the conditions needed, not just for life of any kind (though the list of conditions for even simple life is long enough), but for advanced, intelligent life. So your objection fails.
Well, you are free to read his books and go through his list of coincidences and prune away the ones that aren’t. And if you knock down, say, 200 coincidences to only 100, you’ve still got some explaining to do if you think chance alone accounts for what we see.
He has lengthy discussion of ozone in one (I think actually more than one) of his books. You can read his account and see. But I hardly need that specific example to make the general point I was making.
Who says that “chance alone” is the answer? I think that there is a lot that you are missing.
That is not a promising sign because the ozone layer is a consequence of photosynthetic life. I don’t need to read Denton to know that.
So we’ve already got two fake “coincidences” mentioned here and I’m inclined to add nitrogen to the list since the oxygen concentration is rather more important.
It fails only if you suppose that intelligent life must be limited to the conditions suitable for H. sapiens. But what is your justification for that? Why couldn’t intelligent life be possible under other conditions? Where’s the uncrossable barrier between extremophiles and intelligence?
I see you ignore the bit about photosynthesis, one of Denton’s coincidences. Why?
You need a lot of specific examples, and if most of them fail, your point disappears.
Since you haven’t read what he says about ozone, how do you know the fact that he discusses ozone is “not a promising sign”?
I was the one who picked the example of ozone, and in picking it, I was not claiming that Denton used it as an independent property; I was just tossing out some random properties that popped into my head, to explain to Faizal the general principle of compounding probabilities. And I also said that some of the properties might not be independent, and that if they were removed from the list for that reason, that would change the calculation. I did not need your help, still less your “correction”, here.
Whether oxygen is “more important” is irrelevant to the point Denton was making, which was about the dangers of too much nitrogen. The right amount of nitrogen still remains a requirement.
It’s only a tension if you assume that the designer was trying to achieve many planets with intelligent life. But it’s quite possible that the designer was content with a universe in which only a few planets, or only one planet, produced intelligent life. If that was the designer’s intention, then one would expect the details of the fine-tuning to be such that intelligent life would be vanishingly rare. Denton does not explicitly say, as far as I know, that the Earth is the only planet in the universe with intelligent life, but he does seem to suggest that with the fine-tuning of the universe that we observe, one would expect relatively few planets with intelligent life.
I don’t assume that, and neither does Denton. It doesn’t have to be homo sapiens specifically, but it does have to be an organic being with higher intelligence, and that is not achievable (as far as current science tells us, anyway) without a large number of biological prerequisites. When you think of the beings with high intelligence that we know of (e.g., dolphins or octopuses, both of which fall short of the richness of human intelligence), it’s clear that more than a single cell is going to be required, even for non-human higher intelligence. And he’s not talking about just “cleverness in dealing with an environment” when he speaks of higher intelligence. He is talking about beings who can understand the laws of nature and speculate about the origin of the universe and their own origin and purpose. If you think that extremophiles on a planet with a surface temperature of 400 degrees could evolve intelligence in that sense, you are welcome to postulate a scenario in which they might do so.
I agree, but you can’t possibly know if most of them fail, until you read enough of Denton to know what they are. It seems clear that people here have already decided, on the strength of a pop video produced by Discovery, covering only his discussion of water, and even that in a truncated and simplified form, that none of his arguments in any of his books (which cover many things beyond water) could possibly be any good. But such prejudice is nothing new here; in fact, it’s standard operating behavior.
If Denton does not make the claim that the ozone layer is a “coincidence” then your recommendation is even more incomprehensible. If I wanted to find the origin of the ozone layer why would I choose Denton’s book? It’s hardly a sensible choice,
More, I don’t think that there are any sensible points to be made about the ozone layer in this context - it’s essentially down to the interactions of oxygen and UV light.
It is still a point which needs emphasising. Because assuming that the alleged “coincidences” are independent is really not going to be good enough,
Given that nitrogen is the most abundant component of the Earth’s atmosphere and almost all the rest is oxygen that isn’t much of an objection. There couldn’t be much more nitrogen.
Which again shows just how ad hoc the whole fine tuning hypothesis is.
But it is worse than that - there isn’t even a clear reason why the alleged fine tuner would want intelligent life.
Really, I think it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees, in that not only are there many things wrong with the components of the argument, but there is always, looming over the whole thing, the basic problem that the inference it’s meant to support doesn’t follow, in any event. The argument, properly made, if its components were not so miserably poor, would lead to nothing but the conclusion that we need to look into how the attributes of the universe, or the planet, or this puddle which is so brilliantly shaped to fit the body of water which sits in it, got to be the way they are.
My sense of this is that there are two kinds of “arguments” that serve very different purposes, but that people make the mistake of using the one for the other. There are arguments which are actually meant to convince: they have some sort of persuasive power and rest upon inferences in which reasonable people can see merit. But then there are arguments like fine-tuning: useful as belief-affirming apologetic. Arguments like this are utterly useless for convincing fair-minded people, and should never be offered as though they are anything but a way for people to pat themselves on the back for having chosen the right god and to coo over just how peachy that god must be to have arranged this party just for us.
Again and again, this is what I see: that it is absolutely impossible for some people to imagine what it looks like to be an honest inquirer after the truth: to be someone who says, “I don’t know if there are great ghostly powers at work in the universe, but would be interested in knowing whether there’s any evidence for or against that proposition.” To such a person arguments like this miss the point entirely. Evidence bearing upon those questions, rather than merely suggesting that there are some unexplained things, the explanation for which could be a god, in circumstances where we have absolutely no reason to believe that that actually IS the explanation, would be welcome. But all we get is arguments – arguments of a ridiculously indirect and unhelpful character – rather than evidence.
How do you know that even a slightly greater percentage of nitrogen wouldn’t cause the problem he’s pointing out? It sounds as if you’re presenting off-the-cuff reasoning, and unless you are a specialist in atmospheric chemistry and the chemistry of combustion, I have no reason to trust such autodidactic improvising.
Why should that matter, if the only thesis on the table is that nature is fine-tuned, not why nature is fine-tuned?
Your response just reeks of partisanship, and doesn’t warrant a response.
Apparently, you think that temperature is one of those prerequisites, such that a temperature of 400 degrees is right out. What makes you think current science tells us that?
Obviously, but how is that relevant? Do you suppose that multicellularity must arise only at temperatures below 400 degrees? If so, why?
I think you need to provide reasons why they wouldn’t. So far, nothing.
The ones we’ve seen so far clearly fail. Are you claiming that those are not representative? If they’re representative, they would be a valid sample to use in deciding the probable nature of the rest.
You refuse to cite a single datum to support Denton’s conclusions.
You seem to be unwilling to watch the video to see if it is representative of Denton’s books.
Yet you keep repeating the same tired mantra:
Most of us value our time more highly than that, based on Denton’s laughable paper in an ID journal and YT video. The scraps of evidence he cites are not even slightly convincing.
If you think that such evidence exists, why can’t you cite any, shorn of rhetoric?
You claim that Denton cites lots of evidence in his books, but you can’t cite any actual evidence that’s convincing.
Could it be that you have never, ever even looked at any of the evidence allegedly cited for yourself, because you are afraid that it will fail to convince even you?
I think it’s fair to assume that, as these are the ones put forward in a short summary, they are the BEST examples. It almost certainly gets far, far worse. Excellent, as I said, for people who already believe this stuff to pat each other on the back with, but utterly useless, or worse than useless, as an argument directed to the attention of reasonable and fair-minded people.
Well first of all I gave actual reasons why it’s crap. Me pronouncing it crap is not in itself supposed to make you roll over and die. And lol, you just can’t get over my credentials can you? Who is this little shit on the internet who keeps calling your trash out for what it is? It doesn’t matter, the argument must stand on it’s own merits.
Sadly I can’t claim to be the first to have come up with that response. It is in fact one of those put forward by “the finest theoretical minds of the day”. And I just haven’t seen a good response back, and I’ve looked.
Does it make any sense? Is it supported by the evidence (if any) Denton cites? Have you looked at any of the evidence for yourself, or is everyone supposed to take this “lengthy discussion” as the last word?
Again, without a rigorous mathematical calculation I have no idea how many grandmothers would share those exact characteristics if the total number of grandmothers was 1025. And neither do you. You are just pulling random numbers out of, er, let’s say thin air.
And the thing is, that is not even what Denton is trying to calculate. He is trying to calculate the number of possibly life sustaining planets. He makes no argument why such a planet must be absolutely identical to earth. In fact, not even earth has already been identical to the present earth in that regard. For about 1.5 billion years, life thrived on earth without any atmospheric oxygen.
So basically Denton is making a probability claim without determining either the numerator or denominator.
But, right, he’s a very serious thinker, uh huh, sure…
Eddie kept telling us how amazing Denton’s arguments were.
And then we watched a video of Denton making this amazing argument, and were flabbergasted and anyone with two neurons two rub together would stand before an audience and utter such inanities.
But, never fear, Denton has a book in which he makes the same argument, only this time it is a good argument and Eddie cannot actually give us any of its specifics but, really, it is a really, really good argument and Eddie is telling us the truth this time.
On the principle that one always leads with one’s best arguments, the only real mystery about Denton’s new book is: if these are the best arguments, how much more horrible does it get as he works his way down to the weaker subsidiary arguments? On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine how one starts out with arguments which have not a single thing to recommend them – wrong reasoning, wrong facts, wrong conclusions, followed by a massive leap to a non sequitur inference – and then makes it worse. On the other hand, I have seen the most astonishing feats of illogic performed by DI associates, and when you think you’ve seen these people at rock-bottom, they always turn up again, this time with a 40-ouncer of Old English 800 wrapped in a paper bag, asking for spare change to fight the materialists and buy some food.
Perhaps the project is to inspire those who believe in science, and who have some hope for the future of mankind, to lapse irreversibly into despair at the state of humanity and its wretched incapacity for productive thought. That Denton video is a pretty good down payment on such a strategy. When we’re all wallowing in despair, the idea is to sneak in the back door and steal our parking-meter change from the kitchen drawer and use it to buy more Old English 800.
Please give me a list of planets known to have multicellular life where the temperature is never lower than 400 degrees. And then tell me whether your hypothetical planet with temperatures of 400 degrees has water on it, and if not, how your hypothetical multicellular life gets along without water.
By that you mean, you can’t see any flaw in the bright idea you came up with, so you must be right. I don’t intend to spend the rest of my days objecting to bright ideas you come up on the spur of the moment that you deem reasonable. Nor do I intend to continue debating with someone who declares to be wrong an author whom he has not read.
No, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know whether the designer wanted to produce only one world with intelligent life, or whether he hoped to produce billions (but so far apart in space-time that the intelligent life on each world would for centuries of its intellectual development (prior to developing cosmological science) suppose itself to be the only such life), in order to perceive that the conditions required to produce intelligent life are complex and overlapping, and that we would not expect to find relatively many worlds with intelligent life even with careful fine-tuning, and that we might not get any such worlds at all without it.
Of course, being a mind reader, you know what I “want.” Yet you accused me of bad dialogical manners when I read your mind, based on your posts, and inferred that you were an atheist. Physician, heal thyself.
If you value your time so highly, why have you spent 10 years and thousands of hours on websites, arguing about origins issues in a setting where 99% of the participants will not budge an inch and no conversation ever gets any closer to agreement? What have you gained by engaging in repeated quarrels over the same points, that end up the same way as they have ended up since the Dover trial? At least if you read a new book, you might learn something, no matter how little, whereas the activity you are involved in produces no learning either for you or for the opponent you berate.
I notice that, once again, even when the topic was raised directly, you have declined to set forth even the most minimal statement of your Christian religious belief, or explain why you have never once in 10 years, on web sites where Christianity is often unfairly attacked, risen to its defense. Curious minds will wonder why.
Already dealt with. I gave only about 7 overlapping characteristics. By adding more, I could eat up 10^25 quite quickly.
Of course not, because that is not his argument. But you’ll never know his argument, because you won’t read it. In fact, you have spent more time quarrelling with me (me alone, never mind the others) on this site over the past few years than it would have taken you read all of Denton’s books at a leisurely pace. It seems you like quarrelling more than learning.
