Gosh I’m not getting much right today, am I?
What I refer to is that we can repeat physical and chemical experiments to see if an observed outcome will be reproduced. I think this is what lee_merrill referred to when he brought up Napoleon at Waterloo. This approach won’t work for reconstructing history, which is to a large extent abductive and not deductive. Isn’t that what you meant when you said that History isn’t science?
But Meyer was talking about other explosions, other than the Cambrian one, so the point is relevant.
So you dispute Koonin’s estimate? How so? And the appearance of the interactome, and racemic mixtures, etc. are as intractable as ever.
I’m saying they all will occur, and in an unexpected way, perhaps God can change the past?
Oh, come on, now. It cannot be difficult at all for you to see that Meyer was talking about the origin of mammals, not the post-K-Pg-event radiation of mammals. I even highlighted how insane his remarks on this point were in my review, which you have read, by pointing to the actual fossil precursors of mammals. But for him to have been claiming, as you indicate, that the post-K-Pg radiation was not prefaced by fossil evidence would be MORE insane than what he actually said, rather than less. He was not talking about the post-K-Pg radiation. If he had been, that would actually have been worse than what he has said, and what I have answered.
And, by the way, if you are looking for an event that’s hard to explain, the post-K-Pg mammalian radiation wouldn’t be it.
It appears that the rise of mammals is unsettled, though.
Because if non-reasoning causes produce reason, there is no reason to trust our reason. By the rule of logic, then, if there is reason to trust our reason, then reasoning causes produced reason.
It was a serious question, if non-reasoning causes produced a lucid paragraph, then it might be a curiosity, but it should not be taken seriously.
No, a perfect Reason could produce imperfect reason in creatures, but we can still trust our reason to some extent, since it comes from a source of reason.
“Here we offer a simple kinematical argument, requiring no energy condition, that a cosmological model which is inflating—or just expanding sufficiently fast—must be incomplete in null and timelike past directions.”
Which is a fancy way of saying a universe which is expanding had a beginning. And this does point to God, the origin of the universe must be immaterial, intentional, and timeless.
That does not “baldly conclude that ‘the universe had a beginning’.”
And that is your misinterpretation of it. The quoted statement does not come even close to stating that the universe had a beginning. All it is stating that this universe (by which it means this current space-time) could not have been inflationary indefinitely. It does not implicate a beginning, let alone a beginning for ‘the universe’ more broadly construed (i.e. to include anything physical that might have existed before the current space-time).
Thank you for demonstrating my point. 
Not a very good article, that; better to cite the primary literature and say something less ambiguous than what you’ve said above – honestly, I have no idea what you mean about the rise being unsettled, and I have a strong suspicion that you have no idea what you mean, either. By the way, nobody dates the origin of mammals to 93 million years ago – the fossils flatly contradict that. It looks like the author of this article doesn’t know what he was reading, and goofed it up. Perhaps 93 million is somebody’s proposed date for the LCA of modern placentals? I don’t know. But this isn’t a great piece.
But this article relates to the radiation of crown-group mammals (and maybe, as I’ve suggested, not even to all of them), not to the origin of mammals, which is what Meyer was talking about. So, once again, you’re just wildly off-topic. Are there disputes in mammalian phylogenetics? Sure! Some trees now show a polytomy between Carnivora, Perissodactyla and Artiodactyla, for example, and arguments rage. But none of that helps Stephen Meyer’s argument, which is flatly contrary to massive volumes of plain evidence. For Meyer to be wrong, he just needs to be wrong, and he is – badly. Meyer being wrong does not require that we have no remaining disputes in mammalian phylogenetics.
Paywalled, but I can say with great confidence that the article you link will not support the contention I was asking about. Is this conscious avoidance or failure to comprehend?
I don’t think you can provide an argument to support that claim.
How do you know there is reason to trust our reason? I think if you examine this closely, you will find that you are arguing in circles.
Even if your assumptions are true, that doesn’t provide a reason to trust our reason. Any evidence that our reason should be trusted would be empirical. (And your personal example of reasoning is not lending any evidence in that department.) You are making a circular argument here: we can trust our reason because it comes from a source of reason, and we know it comes from a source of reason because we can trust it. Even you must be able to see the circularity in that.
Sorry, I must have been grumpy. 
No worries, happens to all of us from time to time!
False assumption. We’re not talking about any general population. We are talking about a specific subpopulation.
Not math.
So you didn’t provide any real math.
If they are forgeries you cannot make this assumption.
“The Borde–Guth–Vilenkin theorem , or the BGV theorem , is a theorem in physical cosmology which deduces that any universe that has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past spacetime boundary.[1]” (Wikipedia here)
Theoretical cosmologist Sean M. Carroll argues that the theorem only applies to classical spacetime, and may not hold under consideration of a complete theory of quantum gravity. He added that Alan Guth, one of the co-authors of the theorem, disagrees with Vilenkin and believes that the universe had no beginning.[8][9] Vilenkin argues that the Carroll-Chen model constructed by Carroll and Jennie Chen, and supported by Guth, to elude the BGV theorem’s conclusions persists to indicate a singularity in the history of the universe as it has a reversal of the arrow of time in the past.[10]
From the same Wikipedia article. So no, this theorem does not unambiguously state that the universe had a beginning.
I think what he’s focused on is the explosion in the fossil record, though, which is correct. And are you going to address the other points I made in reply to your review?
We never admit any exceptions to this rule in real life, though, as C.S. Lewis noted. If we know that delirium produced the claim that there are spiders on the wall, we do not even bother to look for them.
I just reversed and negated the components of the first statement, which I think is a self-evident statement. I.e. if A implies B, then not B implies not A. No circles are involved.
Now that would be arguing in a circle, you have to assume the validity of reason in order to evaluate it empirically.
Balderdash! “In real life” this question would rarely come up. And when it does, I would suggest that emotional or chemical imbalances, cognitive biases, and the like would be the causes attributed for unreason, not that “if non-reasoning causes produce reason, there is no reason to trust our reason” – the latter would appear to have currency only in the unreal life of Christian Apologists.
CS Lewis noting this balderdash can easily be attributed to the fact that he had no background whatsoever in Neuroscience, or even modern Philosophy of Mind.
No, that’s completely incorrect. He is saying that the first mammals appear without precursors in the fossil record. The adaptive radiation following the K-Pg event, 100 million plus years later, is clearly not relevant to that in any way; and if that had been what he’d been referring to, that would have been another order of magnitude more silly than what he said.
Surely you are not actually this confused. Read Meyer. He is not talking about the post-K-Pg radiation of mammals. He’s just not. Not even close.
Your probability claim? I assume you already know that pulling a number for the probability of random spontaneous assembly of a long nucleotide sequence is not relevant, so I assume you already understand that there’s no need to respond. Right? I haven’t actually got a copy of Koonin’s book so I cannot put your attribution of that number to him in context, but you know the drill: creationist points to absurdly large number, without context, asserts this is completely impossible; actual biology does not propose it to be possible in that particular way, ergo, creationist contention is irrelevant. I assume you’ve probably already had that conversation many times before, and if not, I’d suggest you find someone more patient to try it out on.
I once knew a fellow, now deceased, who could not simply run over a snake in the road with his truck. When he had, he would stop, back up, run over the snake in reverse, run over it again forward, and then one more pass for good measure. In honor of his memory, let me follow his example.
Meyer says, in his book:
The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil‐bearing sedimentary rock.
Now, anyone familiar with the way Meyer uses ellipses, eliminating 15 pages at a go from the text, may shudder at the combination of Meyer and ellipses. But for clarity, let’s use some to shorten this:
The first…mammals…appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil‐bearing sedimentary rock.
That, of course, is a bizarre and outrageous lie. I have documented, in my review, the fact. There can be no defense of Meyer on this point, and, apparently recognizing that, you’ve endeavored to defend him by evading the real issue and reconstruing him as though he’d said:
The first mammals appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil‐bearing sedimentary rock. Of course, when I say “first mammals,” I don’t literally mean the first mammals. Why would I say “first mammals” if I meant the first mammals? I mean mammals more than a hundred million years later, survivors of the K-Pg extinction. THEY are the ones who have no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock.
Now, I don’t really buy that rewrite of Meyer. It’s extremely bizarre. But let’s just imagine, for a moment, that he HAD said what you propose to construe him as saying. Would it improve matters? NO! It would make everything vastly worse, and make Meyer more of a liar than he actually is. Now, Meyer would not only be contradicted by the extensive fossil record of the pelycosaurs and therapsids, but also by the first hundred million years of mammalian fossils.
When the DI wants a clown, it has people to go to. Casey Luskin and Jonathan Wells, for example, are never embarrassed to say something that ludicrous. But Stephen Meyer is trying to dice this a bit more finely. Even a rube would laugh at the idiocy of this rewrite of Meyer. Meyer is trying to keep all the rubes on his side, and the way he actually wrote the passage, while obscenely false and absurd to anyone familiar with the facts, cuts that nicely. Most people know nothing about the precursors of mammals, and creationists being a uniquely incurious bunch, he knows he can get away with that. But he doesn’t want to play the clown. For that, read Icons of Evolution, or Luskin’s chapters on human origins in the Theistic Evolution book. Big rubber noses and floppy shoes aplenty there, but not in Meyer’s books. Meyer is aiming at people who finished the third grade, minimum.
It failed, for reasons that you wouldn’t understand.
It doesn’t have the same feedback mechanism.
Unfortunately for you, the ruins of Tyre are not underwater.
As I pointed out here:
So Lee’s claim that “the ancient city of Tyre is substantially underwater, so this ancient city has not been rebuilt” is utter bollocks. Only the outer area of the Southern harbour is underwater. The temple area is not underwater, and it was rebuilt by Crusaders. The southern city wall area is not underwater, and it was rebuilt by Romans. The northern half of the city up the harbour is not underwater, and has been rebuilt in modern times and, since there’s a Byzantine arch in that area, rebuilt before then as well. The ancient city of Tyre is still substantially above water, and has been rebuilt multiple times.
The ruins of Tyre that are underwater, which @lee_merrill claims have never been rebuilt, are a harbour wall and associated buildings that were rebuilt after Nebuchadnezzar, before being inundated by an earthquake in around 500AD.
Anyone interested in how badly @lee_merrill consistently mangles and misrepresents both his sources and facts in general will find many examples at the above link.