Boston Marathon explosions......

[PearlWatson]

Yes, indeed. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss different spheres of knowledge.

Moral value systems are, essentially, formal constructs, built from a few basic principles using logic. Thus, any demonstration of how to construct one is sufficient to show one exists. In particular, to demonstrate than an atheist can have objective value, one need only start with a few positions consistent with ateism and construct an objective value system from them.

Existence claims are based on what is discovered, not constructed. If you claim there are snakes living in a specific holes, you would be expected to provide evidence particular to snakes (scat, track marks, etc.). If you claim there are fairies living in that hole, you would be expected to provide evidence for fairies. Evidence for snakes is commonplace, evidence for fairies (or God) is non-existent.

I want to make this clear, before we possibly go off on other tangents, that my post was to demonstrate the absurdity of your logic (It was the perfect example of Darwiniac logic). I wasn't attempting to make an "existence claim" of my own.

We have a huge problem that I run into with any opposition.

Why should I accept any of your premises/assumptions/definitions over my own? And vice versa. There is really nowhere to go from there.

Example: What evidence would you accept for the existence of fairies? If you assume fairies couldn't possibly exist then there is no possible evidence "particular to a fairy" I could use to convince you. To make matters worse we couldn't come to agreement on what was "particular to a fairy."

We could go further: What if I told you about this unseen thing I believed in called Gravity and you had never heard of it before and my evidence for it was that apples fall out of trees, but no matter how many times you witnessed this occurrence you insisted that it was only an accident. I couldn't help but consider you a fanatical denier. And you would think me crazy for believing in things I couldn't see and dismiss me as a Gravity believer that doesn't believe in Science/evidence. Then you would say your faith in gravity ain't compatible with science. And I would say it takes more faith to believe the falling apple was an accident than to believe in Gravity.

But anyway.

 

[One Brow]

I want to make this clear, before we possibly go off on other tangents, that my post was to demonstrate the absurdity of your logic (It was the perfect example of Darwiniac logic). I wasn't attempting to make an "existence claim" of my own.

Your attempt at a counter was, "Fact: Some people recognize there is a God.". That is an existence claim made by those "some people". Thus, it's a different sort of claim from saying you can demonstrate an objective moral system as an atheist, since moral systems are not things and do not require evidence, but concepts that require development.

We have a huge problem that I run into with any opposition.

Why should I accept any of your premises/assumptions/definitions over my own? And vice versa. There is really nowhere to go from there.

True. Which of the initial assumptions of which particular version of moral naturalism do you find objectionable? Please don't answer "atheism", because atheism is not an axiom of any of those systems.

Example: What evidence would you accept for the existence of fairies? If you assume fairies couldn't possibly exist then there is no possible evidence "particular to a fairy" I could use to convince you. To make matters worse we couldn't come to agreement on what was "particular to a fairy."

Definition can certainly be a problem here. For example, if you meant human-like being about 1 inch tall, with wings, who lived under the rock in your garden, and when you lifted that rock, I could see a 1 inch tall human-like being, that would be convincing, in part because I don't know of any inch-tall humans. If I only saw a very small trail, I would suspect a bug or snake instead, because I know bugs and snakes, and that they sometimes leave trails. Evidence sufficient to support a claim must be based on the nature of the claim itself, as well as whether other explanations make more sense.

We could go further: What if I told you about this unseen thing I believed in called Gravity and you had never heard of it before and my evidence for it was that apples fall out of trees, but no matter how many times you witnessed this occurrence you insisted that it was only an accident. I couldn't help but consider you a fanatical denier. And you would think me crazy for believing in things I couldn't see and dismiss me as a Gravity believer that doesn't believe in Science/evidence. Then you would say your faith in gravity ain't compatible with science. And I would say it takes more faith to believe the falling apple was an accident than to believe in Gravity.

But anyway.

That's where repeatability and predictability come into play. If I insist it's an accident, then by nature I'm saying it's not predictable or reliably repeatable. When you can not only predict the apple falling every time, but even offer a formula that measures how long it takes for the apple to hit the ground from various heights, my insistance on accident is no longer reasonable.

 

[PearlWatson]

That's where repeatability and predictability come into play. If I insist it's an accident, then by nature I'm saying it's not predictable or reliably repeatable. When you can not only predict the apple falling every time, but even offer a formula that measures how long it takes for the apple to hit the ground from various heights, my insistance on accident is no longer reasonable.

See Bill Dembski

 

[candrew]

Disproven? By whom, and how?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuFyxnM4nnI

 

[PearlWatson]

I would be interested to find out how it was disproved and by who?

Darwin's theory:

1. Life began accidentally with a single celled organism (common ancestor)
2. Random(accidental) mutation of new desirable attributes.
3. Natural selection weeding out the "less fit" attributes (circular argument)
4. Leads to creation of new species

Basically, "All life and all the attributes of life are an accident."

Darwin's ridiculous standard to disprove natural selection (engine of change from simple to complex):

"If it can be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Behe produced various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms, of which there are thousands.
Just looking at a bacterial motor(flagellum) Behe demonstrated that it was mathematically impossible for all 30 parts of a flagellum to have been brought together by the "numerous, successive, slight modifications" of natural selection.
He compared the flagellum to a mousetrap, with far fewer components. Though there are only a few parts of a mousetrap all of them have to work together at one time for the mouse trap to serve any function. If one part is missing you don't catch half as many mice, you don't get a mouse trap at all.​

So Behe disproved Darwin's theory of evolution, unless it is simply a non-disprovable pseudoscience.

 

[One Brow]

See Bill Dembski

Bill Dembski's work in "No Free Lunch" is worthless as a description of actual evolutionary processes. His Law of Conservation of Information is disproved trivially. His Specified Complex Information is an oxymoron, since specified means it has a description, and complex means it has no good description.

What Dembski has never done is give a reliable, usable test to detect anything he claims. So, in response to a comment about being testable and predictable, Dembski is an anti-example.

 

[MVP]

Behe produced various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms, of which there are thousands.
Just looking at a bacterial motor(flagellum) Behe demonstrated that it was mathematically impossible for all 30 parts of a flagellum to have been brought together by the "numerous, successive, slight modifications" of natural selection.
He compared the flagellum to a mousetrap, with far fewer components. Though there are only a few parts of a mousetrap all of them have to work together at one time for the mouse trap to serve any function. If one part is missing you don't catch half as many mice, you don't get a mouse trap at all.[/INDENT]

So Behe disproved Darwin's theory of evolution, unless it is simply a non-disprovable pseudoscience.

Behe's claims about the irreducible complexity of essential cellular structures have been rejected by the vast majority of the scientific community, and his own biology department at Lehigh University published an official statement opposing Behe's views and intelligent design.

Numerous scientists have debunked the Behe's work, pointing out that not only has it been shown that a supposedly irreducibly complex structure can evolve, but that it can do so within a reasonable time even subject to unrealistically harsh restrictions, and noting that Behe & Snoke's paper does not properly include natural selection and genetic redundancy. When the issue raised by Behe and Snoke is tested in the modern framework of evolutionary biology, numerous simple pathways to complexity have been shown

Sorry, but he disproved nothing. Speculations based on "it is not possible because it is to complex".

Of course everybody can chose what to believe.

 

[MVP]

And to add to this:

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the first direct challenge brought in United States federal courts to an attempt to mandate the teaching of intelligent design on First Amendment grounds, Behe was called as a primary witness for the defense and asked to support the idea that intelligent design was legitimate science. Some of the most crucial exchanges in the trial occurred during Behe's cross-examination, where his testimony would prove devastating to the defense. Behe was forced to concede that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred" and that his definition of 'theory' as applied to intelligent design was so loose that astrology would also qualify

Sorry PW, not sure how you can believe in it if Behe admitted himself that it is just a theory with no scientific background.

 

[One Brow]

Darwin's theory:

1. Life began accidentally with a single celled organism (common ancestor)
2. Random(accidental) mutation of new desirable attributes.
3. Natural selection weeding out the "less fit" attributes (circular argument)
4. Leads to creation of new species

Basically, "All life and all the attributes of life are an accident."

Darwin's ridiculous standard to disprove natural selection (engine of change from simple to complex):

"If it can be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Behe produced various "irreducibly complex" mechanisms, of which there are thousands.
Just looking at a bacterial motor(flagellum) Behe demonstrated that it was mathematically impossible for all 30 parts of a flagellum to have been brought together by the "numerous, successive, slight modifications" of natural selection.
He compared the flagellum to a mousetrap, with far fewer components. Though there are only a few parts of a mousetrap all of them have to work together at one time for the mouse trap to serve any function. If one part is missing you don't catch half as many mice, you don't get a mouse trap at all.​

So Behe disproved Darwin's theory of evolution, unless it is simply a non-disprovable pseudoscience.

You are partially correct, that Darwin expected all living things to progress slowly, and sometimes bacteria can, by plasmoid exchange, experience population change very rapidly. So, in that aspect, Darwin was wrong. No big deal, everyone biologist worth their salt knows that Darwin made errors. No one is perfect.

However, Behe's example only showed that Behe doesn't really understand how evolution works. Just because when you take away the trigger, you don't have a functional mousetrap, doesn't mean what you have is completely non-functional. For example, in the absence of anything else, a wire spring-mounted to a bit of wood makes a great tie clip. In evolutionary theory, all that you need is some purpose for the construct to be preserved. It doesn't have to have a single, well-defined purposeat any point, much less throughout it's history.

With regard to the flagellum, Matzke laid out one possible path by which it could have been constructed.

https://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html

This has happened with every example Behe has proposed. Within a couple of years, someone points out that it's not at all impossible.

 

[One Brow]

And to add to this:

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the first direct challenge brought in United States federal courts to an attempt to mandate the teaching of intelligent design on First Amendment grounds, Behe was called as a primary witness for the defense and asked to support the idea that intelligent design was legitimate science. Some of the most crucial exchanges in the trial occurred during Behe's cross-examination, where his testimony would prove devastating to the defense. Behe was forced to concede that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred" and that his definition of 'theory' as applied to intelligent design was so loose that astrology would also qualify

Sorry PW, not sure how you can believe in it if Behe admitted himself that it is just a theory with no scientific background.

Technically, the astrology admission happened at the deposition, not the trial itself, IIRC.

 

[MVP]

​

Technically, the astrology admission happened at the deposition, not the trial itself, IIRC.

Funny thing, Behe admitted that even his own mother disagrees with him

 

[PearlWatson]

Behe's claims about the irreducible complexity of essential cellular structures have been rejected by the vast majority of the scientific community, and his own biology department at Lehigh University published an official statement opposing Behe's views and intelligent design.

Numerous scientists have debunked the Behe's work, pointing out that not only has it been shown that a supposedly irreducibly complex structure can evolve, but that it can do so within a reasonable time even subject to unrealistically harsh restrictions, and noting that Behe & Snoke's paper does not properly include natural selection and genetic redundancy. When the issue raised by Behe and Snoke is tested in the modern framework of evolutionary biology, numerous simple pathways to complexity have been shown

Sorry, but he disproved nothing. Speculations based on "it is not possible because it is to complex".

Of course everybody can chose what to believe.

I realize that the Darwin cult has denied that Darwin's theory was disproved. That is why I call them Darwiniacs: people who cling to a non-disprovable pseudoscience.

I just love when Darwiniacs use general claims about "numerous scientists" after I specify a scientist. Here is some specific scientists who admit Cultists don't have a scientific refutation for Behe.

Tom Cavalier-Smith(biologist): "For none of the cases mentioned by Behe is there yet a comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of the observed complexity."
Robert Dorit(molecular biologist): "In a narrow sense, Behe is correct when he argues that we do not yet fully understand the evolution of the flagellar motor or blood clotting cascade."

But the culties still have faith in the Darwinian mechanism of evolution. They'll figure out how to prove it eventually. Just like Mormon apologists just haven't found the scientific evidence for their faith either.

*****

Irreducible complexity ain't about speculation. It is Darwin's own test to disprove his theory. If you don't have such a test or refuse to acknowledge such a test has failed then you stop being science based and become religion based.