I would suggest that Korthof’s “Implications of the Dynamic-Creation Model”, numbers 1 through 12 remain open questions.
Highlights include:
How many basic types are there? Creationists don’t tell us. Until we know this, the dynamic-creation model is only a fragment of a theory.
I have to ask, what makes you think that the mere copying of this mere “fragment of a theory”, attenuated by its filtering through a secondary source, by a copyist who appears to know sweet Fanny Adams about the underlying science, is in any way a meaningful endeavor?
Addendum:
Having read all but two pages of Nelson’s chapter “Unfit for survival. The fatal flaws of natural selection” in Dembski, William, and Kushiner, James, 2001, Signs of Intelligence, on Google Books, I have come to the suspicion that Korthof may have misattributed Nelson’s material to it. Does anybody have access to the full book chapter to confirm (the pages Google Books was missing were 140-141)?
Further Addendum:
Yes, it is misattributed on the web, but not in the original book, which I luckily have. The actual attribution is to a different 2001 book chapter by Nelson, this one in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: “The Role of Theology in Current Evolutionary Reasoning”.
The past is irrelevant to your question. Your hypothesis* is NOW, in the present, and you have not suggested any means how your hypothesis could ever be falsified, even in theory. You acknowledged this criticism on multiple occasions before, bit I don’t think you understand it.
Technically you don’t have a hypothesis, because there no possible falsification, but I understand your meaning - no need to quibble.
If you wish to revise and restart with a new thread, then more power to you. However, I am unlikely to participate, because from my perspective you haven’t really addressed the most serious criticisms at all. Instead I would encourage you to join in some of the other discussions here. Our goal is to establish Common Ground for understanding each other. You express yourself well enough, but I think you could benefit from learning to understand a little better (so could we all).
And this has caused you to garble things yet again.
In a previous thread you stated (or rather restated) that:
This statement seemed incoherent to us at the time.
Having now skimmed Nelson’s original chapter, I can tell you that he DID NOT talk about dynamic basic types. Rather he was talking about his creation model being dynamic:
Rather, one will find extended discussions of what I will term dynamic theories of creation – as represented, for instance, by figure 32.2.
This again shows why you should not use secondary sources!
Ahhh… I think there is a misunderstanding of what I said before here. When I suggested that my method of testing was unfalsifiable for present events, I meant this in regards to verifying my hypothesis. For instance, as you already know, there are certain predictions that are set up to falsify a hypothesis. Then, there are predictions that are meant to verify the hypothesis BUT these predictions also have to be falsifiable within themselves. This latter case is what I meant before in regards to how present events render the hypothesis unfalsifiable.
However, when it comes to falsifying my hypothesis altogether, it does not matter whether the experiment simulates past/present/future events or whether other finite minds exist. In fact, the method of testing does not even require natural conditions that actually took place. All it takes for falsification is a possible natural condition that can be tested to show that unguided material processes can produce the same effect.
Again, I encourage you to watch that video where atheist physicist Sean Carroll explains how God is falsifiable if you are still not convinced by my reasoning . He reiterates my point.
I expect Hominidae (great apes) to be an exception because of personal preference disguised as some completely ad hoc justification that is inconsistently not applied to Octopodidae and Delphinidae.
No, and you have already agreed to this point: you cannot falsify design by demonstrating evolution. More generally, you cannot falsify one hypothesis by demonstrating another unless the two are directly linked. To meet this condition your hypothesis would need to state that evolution is not possible, ever.
Not at all convinced. I seriously question the claim that Sean Carroll would say that God can be falsified by demonstrating evolution (he is a physicist, not a biologist, after all). Further, I question the premise that any concept of God as we understand can be defined, much less falsified, by material evidence.
I have never presented my argument in the same fashion as ID theorists, which is what you are referring to here. Whether a feature in nature is irreducibly complex (top-down) or reducible simple (bottom-up) has no bearing on whether an intelligent designer was part of the process or not let alone a divine one. We are dealing with a contingent being here, which is something that only ID theorists argue as well. More importantly, my method of testing would not apply to there hypothesis and vice-versa.
Instead, the question is whether chemical or biological evolution was a guided or unguided process by a DIVINE designer. I am not trying to disprove evolution or poke holes nor have I ever tried on here with some exception. I made this very clear beforehand.
Well, I explained this to everyone already here why this is the case but I have not seen you respond to it yet:
@Meerkat_SK5 I feel I should take a moment to make clear that I am criticizing your hypothesis and not your belief. Those things are independent in my mind. It is NOT my intent to mock you.
Unchanged. A divine designer should not be definable or falsifiable in a material sense. If it is, then I do not understand how you are defining “divine”.
But I did respond, and you replied. My emphasis …
I can still say it is unfalsifiable because the essential problem remains. If we demonstrate a particular random evolutionary pathway, how are we to know the designer did not use this same pathway as the means of design? This is what I mean by …
… you cannot falsify design by demonstrating evolution.
You have changed a few words in your hypothesis, but not addressed how it can ever be falsified, even theoretically.
Now, I changed the statement to this: “An intelligent designer must exist to guide all life on earth”.
AND if the designer is guiding evolution, then design will be forever untestable. If I didn’t reply to this is May, it’s because I didn’t see any reason to reiterate a point I had just finished making in an earlier discussion.
Now if you changed your hypothesis to “a (divine) designer would not create by means of evolution,” then it might be falsified as you describe. It may also open whole new can of worms about discerning the motives of a divine creator, but that’s another topic.
Not to mention, of course, the core difficulty referenced in the quote of my post there: showing that some particular set of laboratory conditions does not, in a small sample during a limited period of time, result in the generation of new life just doesn’t help. What Meerkat is seeking is to show the impossibility of any such occurrence happening on any scale or timeframe in any known or unknown set of conditions on the ancient earth. Two problems, one general and one specific: (1) impossibility of a loosely-understood kind of occurrence is just the kind of thing which can never be demonstrated empirically, and (2) any experiment, even if it could show impossibility of life arising under its own conditions (which it really can’t), would not tell us anything about the possibility of life arising under all other possible sets of conditions, both imagined and not-imagined.
While there is no aspect of this argument which has ever worked worth a damn, this seems to me to be the central non sequitur around which the other ill-formed definitions, non sequiturs and basic errors of reason revolve. The experimental proposal is not so much a proposal to do any useful work as it is a proposal to try to make an exercise in bad philosophy sound like it’s some sort of empirical inquiry.
No, this was not what I was referring to. Again, I am NOT implying that a disembodied mind/souls exists or the human mind exists outside of space and time in the context of substance dualism, which is a hallmark of the natural vs supernatural dichotomy, but that one substance and one reality exists.
Instead of the mind/information existing as or in the brain/matter via materialism, it is the brain/matter that exists within the mind/information as an information construct. In other words, brain/matter is still real but not “Objectively” real where matter/brain and its effects are only real because the mind/information makes it real. Here, let me show you an example of what I mean…
According to John chapter 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. “…The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The Greek meaning for “the Word” mentioned in John 1:1-3 is “something said; by implication, a topic, also reasoning or motive; by extension, a COMPUTATION; specially, the Divine Expression.” [emphasis added]
In other words, God is Digital information in the form of logical absolutes and mathematical language. This is where the quantum aspect of the human mind is relevant here since it is also digital information in the form of computation according the Orch-OR theory. So if you guys try to suggests that digital information is supernatural or divine and quantum physics does not involve this, then you would be wrong.
Now, you have suggested in previous posts…
Digital information is not just a useful fiction but an actual fundamental part of objective reality, such as wave-functions. BTW, both the genetic code and wave-functions involve Shannon information as well. You can watch this video from 0:00 to 11:30 for all the evidence:
Ahhhh… I think I found the actual disconnect here in our discourse. My answer is simple…God does not use matter and energy to affect matter and energy. Instead, he uses digital information in the form of wave-functions to create and design matter and energy. For instance…
According to quantum physics experiments, only the conscious observer has the ability to choose which aspect of nature his knowledge will probe, which is what the results of quantum physics experiments like “quantum erasure with casually DISCONNECTED choice” demonstrate (if I am not mistaken, of course). But, I am not suggesting that the conscious observer’s ability to collapse a waveform means they can control or affect reality using their mind alone like some sort of ESP psychic power.
Instead, since the mind is supposed to be non-local under Orch-OR theory, the observer effect results automatically becomes relevant and supportive to my overall case for God because the immaterial mind is the only true measurement apparatus that performs measurements first on the brain to simultaneous cause a collapse to the wave function.
For example, the observer must first specify or think of which particular wave-function he intends to measure and then, put in place a measuring device that will probe that aspect. Then, only the observer can recognize the answer and understand the results after he chooses between the many possible outcomes.
This is fundamentally why I believe the experimental methods I proposed to test my hypothesis are valid.
For instance, another quantum experiment done on a mathematical theorem showed that “the values that you obtain when you measure its properties depend on the context. So the value of property A, say, depends on whether you chose to measure it with property B, or with property C. In other words, there is no reality independent of the choice of measurement.”
This means that we are not purely passive observers whenever we perform an experiment but are actively affecting what the outcome will be. I highly recommend that you watch this video where I got my information from. It illustrates both my points in a clear and concise manner for laypeople on the subject of quantum physics:
Then, it looks like I officially won you over and I can move on to create the next topic.
No @Puck_Mendelssohn, Its not about nor is it necessary to rule out every possible natural condition in order to confirm or disconfirm my hypothesis. Instead, it’s about ruling out God as being part of the natural process and showing that God is not necessary, which is no different than disproving my hypothesis because the very definition of God is “necessary”.
Now, you did respond with this…
First off, in regards to your second point, you should know that …“…metaphysical necessity entails physical necessity, but not vice versa…”
In regards to point 3,…“A proposition is said to be necessary if it could not have failed to be the case.”
My proposition: “An intelligent designer must guide all life on earth”.
This is essentially no different than saying “God guides all life on earth” because (again) God is defined as being personal and necessary. Moreover, “life” is by definition “digital information”, which is the immaterial means to guide natural processes, as I suggested to Dan.
This means that if a possible natural condition could produce digital information without the input of an intelligent designer, it would disprove my hypothesis.
No, that’s inaccurate. Nothing in your formulation provides any possibility of ruling out natural causes or ruling out any of the gods. What you have is a badly-reworded framing of traditional creationist arguments, muddled up a bit by such things as your odd notions about “digital information” which clearly come from the ID Creationist mountebanks.
If you’re actually interested in the origins of living things, there is interesting research for you to read. But it really doesn’t sound like you are. Instead, you think that scientific experiments can be deployed as a kind of handmaiden to bad philosophy. But such methods will persuade neither scientists nor philosophers.
Define “natural” cause because I am not sure how you are using that term and when you said other gods, are you referring to Gods from a particular religion?
A very long block of text here, none of which address falsifiability.
This also does not address falsifiability.
Not quite!
First, it’s a much weaker proposition than your hypothesis.
Second, it’s wrong. I shouldn’t be able to falsify divine action with material evidence. (That wasn’t a trap, I just realized my error last night.)
Third, even if true, you still have no positive evidence in favor of design.
If this is your way of thinking, then that is also wrong.
Note: I didn’t mean for you to respond again to Puck, I just wanted to quote your entire response. However …
This happens all the time, so I guess we are done?
Oh, seriously? You first. It’s your hypothesis and I would be shocked to find that I am the one who introduced that word into this conversation.
I don’t think I said anything about “other” gods. Indeed, I don’t think anyone has mentioned any particular gods here, have they? I take you to be referring to any and all of the gods, not to any one of them in particular.
Yes, these threads have been full of those kinds of stoppers, and yet it doesn’t stop. Every time two squirrels mate, most ID hypotheses are falsified, and the world thus becomes a better place both due to the increased likelihood of future squirrels and due to the negation of more religious fundamentalist claptrap. And yet, with squirrels in the very trees around them, the cdesign proponentsists just keep on being nutty.
No no no, what I mean is that God did not use matter and energy as a means to affect chemical evolution. He used digital information in the form of wave-functions.
I hope I don’t sound condescending to you when I say this but I think that you probably have a lack of understanding for quantum physics, which is creating a disconnect within our discourse. Again, I really encourage you to watch the two videos I provided before, especially if you don’t want to read the huge block of text posted. Those videos sum up everything I argued before in a clear and concise manner. After you watch it, you should be able to see why my argument and method of testing is valid.
I am not sure what you meant here. Miller-Urey and the Lenski experiment did not produce new digital information so I don’t get where you are going with this.
Wrong, and wrong. But if you’re not able to understand objections, then you will not be able to respond to them, and I suppose that perhaps I need to say that this is no skin off my nose while you construct your elaborate pseudo-philosophical notion.
While I have seen it said that “if you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics,” I think I have never seen it so convincingly demonstrated.
