Side Comments on Progress after the Royal Society Conference

[Faizal_Ali]

@lee_merrill

@Faizal_Ali

Your view is that naturalism cannot produce a mind capable of rational thought (of which even the mind of someone with schizophrenia is capable)

No, this is silly, I’m claiming naturalism is false! It’s an incorrect description of our universe, and in particular, of our brains and thinking and reasoning.

Oh. So, if we take your words above at face value, here is your position:

Naturalism is false. But it would be silly to believe that, if naturalism was true, it could not produce minds capable of rational thought.

Is that really what you believe?

@lee_merrill

Irrational thoughts! That might be part of a condition. Exactly, clearly you must mean a mental illness can cause irrational / unreasoning thoughts and conclusions. Otherwise, why would a psychiatrist ever give a pill to correct brain chemistry? Why not just try and discuss with them? You need to abandon this claim that psychiatrists never consider that a client may have a condition may be what is causing illogical, incorrect thinking.

No, you need to abandon your belief that you are entitled in any way to lecture an actual psychiatrist regarding what psychiatrists do in their practice. Or that you are capable of understanding what I am claiming. I have never claimed that “psychiatrists never consider that a client may have a condition may be what is (sic) causing illogical, incorrect thinking.”

What I do reject is your repeated claim that the assessment of whether a person is thinking rationally is based on whether their thought are produced by what you call “unreasoning causes”, which is the term you use to describe undirected physical processes such as those involved in evolution.

@lee_merrill

I wish you would ask me what am arguing for, instead of telling what my view is. No, this is not my view, I don’t claim that an unreasoning cause must be a purely physical process undesigned by God, there might be other factors, such as people getting into an illogical rut of thinking, racism comes to mind.

Oh, so you are not arguing that rational thoughts cannot be produced by purely physical causes, and you do believe they require that they be created by a god or some other such supernatural being? Sorry, I could have sworn that was what you have been arguing all along. Well, I guess I shouldn’t base my understanding of your argument by the words you write in this forum. I guess I’m supposed to, I don’t know, read your mind or something? Please advise.

@lee_merrill

Well, you also must make a distinction between rational thought and irrational thought, such as is found in mental illness, correct?

Of course. I have never denied this. You seem to imagine I have been denying it. Crom knows why.

@lee_merrill

My whole argument has been that people recognize such distinctions, and they go directly against the view of the enlightened materialists, who claim everything, including our thoughts, can be explained by the motion of atoms.

Well, OK. So you do believe that. Well, sure, people do recognize those distinctions. Again, that is not something anyone here as denied. But the fact that they recognize these distinctions does not, in anyway, support your denial that rational thought can be explained by the motion of atoms. There are a number of logical steps missing from your attempted argument.

@lee_merrill

I think the confusion is yours, you waffle back and forth between distinguishing between rational and irrational thoughts, and unreasoning causes causing every thought.

There is no contradiction there. You only see a contradiction because you are in a state of perpetual confusion. I believe every thought, rational or irrational, is produced by “unreasoning causes”, i.e. physical processes that are the result of the process of evolution.

@lee_merrill

Um, I’m still waiting for the relevant evidence. And I did check on Behe’s book where he answers his critics, that implies looking at Behe’s veracity, along with checking the soundness of his arguments. And I’ve read other peoples’ responses to what Behe wrote and said, notably Larry Moran on his Sandwalk blog.

Well, I don’t doubt that your eyes looked at the words in those documents. But it is very, very far from likely that you were able to understand them adequately to form a rationally defensible conclusion. Of course, Behe writes his books just for people like you, so naturally you find him convincing.

@lee_merrill

I agree (and agreed) that multiple mutations were required, and certainly Behe didn’t mean all the mutations magically happened at the exact same moment. He had in mind that the various mutations did not confer a selective benefit, so they would not tend to be kept, unless they all had arrived.

He did add that qualifier, but also stated (correctly, as it happens) that if a mutation is deleterious enough, they would have to happen so close to simultaneously that calculating the odds of simultaneous mutations provides a close enough approximation.

His error (well, one of them) is in assuming that such traits can only arise by successively selected steps, or (near) simultaneous mutation. There is a very important and common alternative that he deliberately ignores, because he knows it skuttles his argument: Successive addition of neutral/nearly neutral mutations.

@lee_merrill

How about “Waiting on Two Mutations…” (Durrett and Schmidt, Genetics), where we read “Conclusion: Achieving two coordinated mutations in humans (where the first mutation does not confer a benefit) would take > 100 million years!”

Note the word “coordinated” there. That is not what your claim is. The claim you are trying to defend is that any trait requiring more than two mutation cannot arise thru evolution in a reasonable length of time. Not just two pre-specified mutations happening simultaneously in a single individual.