The Argument Clinic

So now you are pushing the actions of your “designer” all the way back to the origin of atoms? Not sure why you keep talking about zebrafish, then, which arose quite a long time after that.

Is an accumulation of evidence from Atoms to Man.

“Thing exists” is not evidence. Even if it’s a dozen things, or a million things. You know this. Quit sealioning, please.

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You are keen on the necessity of atoms, but constant in rejecting the sufficiency of atoms, as if God would not be capable of creating natural processes resulting in the world around us.

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Hi Ron
God is capable of creating processes as we have evidence of many natural processes that contain atoms as key components. If you read my prior post I said it is possible that common descents issues might be closed by a reproductive mechanism discovered in the future. It is also logically possible that God created animals separately.

Thing that exist for a purpose is evidence of intelligent cause.

Yeah, that’s another rule you just made up. I for one do not understand what a “thing that exist (sic) for a purpose” even means. :person_shrugging:

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[…]

“With God as our witness, we thought this turkey would fly.”

Can you identify a few purposes of atoms? How about DNA? How did they come into existence with so many purposes with out an intelligent plan behind them?

No. Not a few, not even one.

Not “so many” either.

This is putting the cart miles ahead of the horse, don’t you think? You have done nothing to establish that atoms or DNA have any purposes – what ever a thing all by itself having a purpose even means – or that they came into existence with one or more of those purposes.

A purpose is something an agent has for a thing, not something a thing has all by itself. Eliminate all intention from the universe, and speaking of “purpose” becomes meaningless.

So if you want to say that atoms came into existence with a purpose, you’ll need to first prove that at the time they came into existence, there existed an agent capable of having a purpose for them, and then that it actually had one. Only once we have established that agent, and that it did have purposes for atoms and DNA, can we go on and ask how they came about with that being having a purpose for them. Of course, that question would at that point be no different than simply asking how they came about at all, since the being having a purpose for them doesn’t really make a difference for the processes by which atoms or DNA is formed.

Exactly. First you need to establish that there could have been and was an intelligent plan, then you can assert that maybe atoms and DNA had purposes, as devised by the planner. But until we have established the existence of that planner and their plan, assuming that there was any intention involved in any of it is premature.

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Atoms have the purpose of assembling to become everything we see in the universe. DNA has the purpose of being the information storage required to generate and sustain living organisms.

This is all pretty straight forward and obvious.

You’ll notice in the passage you quote I do not ask what you thought the purpose of atoms or DNA was. That’s because it has no impact whatsoever on your argument, nor on my objections to it. We have not established that at the time either of them were formed an agent had purposes for them. You can insist that they had them all you like, even assert what they are, but until you present anything at all to make it even remotely plausible, nobody, including yourself, has any reason to take you seriously on this point.

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Well, this is a lot of traffic. You will all note that Bill is incapable of learning even the least little thing. But as long as everyone understands the futility of it all, he sometimes says weird things when you poke him.

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Inductive reasoning does not require identification of an agent to make an inference.

Assuming the existence an agent to establish a ‘purpose’, and then taking the existence of that purpose as evidence of the existence of that agent would appear to be circular reasoning, and thus logically invalid.

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Not assuming but inferring from the evidence. Just as we infer common descent from the pattern evidence.

Yes, assuming. A purpose is something an agent has for a thing, not something a thing has all by itself. And in order to show that there is an agent who has purposes for atoms and DNA you need to show that there is an agent who has purposes for atoms and DNA. You don’t get to just claim there is and then pretend like that is already evidence for it being so. Pretending to know the intentions of that agent enough to say what purposes they specifically have for atoms and DNA likewise does nothing to establish that there is such an agent at all, let alone that the purposes you suggest are in fact the ones that agent has for atoms and DNA.

Except that none of the evidence available to us indicates the existence of an agent who, at the time atoms and DNA were first formed, existed or had any purposes for them. Again, we cannot just take a thing, put it into a purpose-o-meter, and measure that it has a purpose, or what that purpose is. Nothing about the actual observable properties of atoms or DNA suggests the existence or intentions of a prehistoric agent.

You are therefore not inferring their existence or intentions from any evidence, you are just assuming, for no reason at all, that a god exists, and that you, of all people, have something like an access to its mind. In other words, you are just making stuff up, with some impressively childish serving of arrogance, all while having the gall to put it to some comparison to scientific reasoning. Speaking of which:

Correct, it does not. However, you are not performing inductive reasoning. And a statement regarding the existence or character of a purpose an agent has for something is a statement about that agent. For a statement like that to have any chance of being true, the object in question – the agent – has to exist.

If you crave embarassment, by all means, we can go through constructing a formal inductive argument out of this circular mess you are putting forward.

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You keep using that word Bill, but in ways that clearly demonstrate that you have no idea what it means!

Case in point, you have told us in the past that you consider “models” and “arguments” to be evidence. Neither is evidence.

In the cases at hand you are claiming, on the basis of wibbly-wobbly hand-wavy unsubstantiated blather, that somehow DNA and the existence of atoms is evidence of a designer. To call these claims “vacuous” (i.e. “not properly filled out or developed”) would do considerable disfavor to the extreme relative rigidity of a hard vacuum.

You claim that these are “inferences”, but fail to provide any substantiation that they are valid inferences – that the assumptions (implicit and explicit) are true and that the logic is solid.

In the case of DNA, any valid inference would require valid math – and you have repeatedly demonstrated repeatedly that Bill cannot do math.

No Math, no valid inference.

No valid inference, no evidence.

No evidence, no reason for Bill to repeat his talking points, other than his desire to hear the sound of his own voice.

It never ends, but it never begins to have any substance. It’s just a sewer that keeps on giving.

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According to your religion Jesus had a flesh body.

What, you’re not impressed by CretinRoboTool9000?

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