I’m pretty sure that most knowledgeable people know that someone who claims to be an atheist is just making an overstatement about his/her own beliefs. As most knowledgeable people who claim to be atheist probably know that even the most recognizable faces of atheistic propaganda, such as Richard Dawkins, admitted publicly that they are less than 100% certain that God/gods don’t exist.
My question is: Why would anyone who calls himself an atheist make a statement like that?
Where does the 200k years come from?
colewd,
Did you somehow miss John’s comment?
deleted
Bill misses a lot of my comments. Or chooses not to notice them. However, he did respond to that one, technically. So far he hasn’t responded to my reply to that comment.
keiths,
No
So John’s claim that 6 million years and lots of trials through reproduction and isolated populations can create both a chimp population and a human population.
I don’t agree that this is a realistic hypothesis but even if you believe this the next question is where did the ancestors DNA come from?
The second half of your sentence is what is known as “moving the goalposts”. Let’s just stick with human DNA for a while. To that end, I repeat my previous questions: what alternative to mutation and fixation (with or without selection) are you proposing to account for the 20 million changes in each of the two lineages? If we’re talking about design, shouldn’t that look different from a random sprinkling of mutations? And why so many changes that appear to be completely without phenotypic effect?
John Harshman,
This is the discussion. The goal posts are solidly intact. I don’t have a detailed alternative to the chimp and man sharing a common ancestor hypothesis.
I do believe it is a very unlikely explanation because it requires random change to create dramatic change in cognitive ability. At this point there are only speculations that can correlate the DNA change with the origin of language and abstract thought.
colewd,
Watch this video. Then ponder the following:
Keep thinking about that until it sinks in.
I think we’d better start with this question: Who do you think is right, Brad or Jenny?
I see goalpost movement is another thing you are able to do without realizing it. The immediate subject was how you explain specifically human DNA. Then you shifted the goalposts to, apparently, the origin of life. How can you not see that?
This is incoherent. Not only don’t you have a detailed alternative, you don’t have any alternative, however vague. It’s time you faced that. Nor do you seem to know what your sentences mean. You seem to be claiming that DNA differences are not the reason for differences between humans and apes. Do you realize that, and did you actually intend to make that claim?
John, to colewd:
Actually, he does have a vague alternative: that “resources outside the universe” did it.
He also has a slightly more specific version of that which he’s afraid to state outright.
What he doesn’t have are
It must suck. He’s perpetually seeking scientific legitimacy for his religious beliefs, and perpetually failing to achieve it.
Meanwhile he’s as baffled by the Mystery of Selection as Jenny is by the Mystery of the Unchanging Pizza Size.
Likely all religions except Buddhism that has some atheist-looking claims. Some have weird doubts whether it’s a religion, even though it is almost indistinguishable from Catholicism – collective chanting, rosaries, crucifixes (Buddha statuettes), scent in services etc.
colewd,
Yet how could you even stop it? If 2 gene pools were isolated for 6 million years, why on earth wouldn’t their ‘DNA code’ differences show an approximate equivalence to 6 million years’ worth of the random variation that can be generationally observed? You can’t possibly ascribe every single difference to ID? Can you?
Or, trying another tack: Let’s accept that X base changes in the 2 pools are due to the action of the Designer. What accounts for (20 million – X) changes? And what accounts for the identical remainder, in a 6 billion bp genome, if not genetic relationship?
I question your assertion that “Home indoctrination was out of the question”. Jews continued to practice in secret even during the Holocaust. I see no reason to think that Christians in the Soviet Union would have behaved differently. The Wikipedia article notes that “Religious beliefs and practices persisted among the majority of the population”.
That doesn’t follow. Continuing in one’s parents’ religion is the easy and safe choice, particularly when childhood indoctrination strongly predisposes one to do so. It’s hard to see conversion as voluntarily chosen under those circumstances.
I agree with you. My larger point is that childhood indoctrination plays a much larger role in the perpetuation of religion than many theists are comfortable admitting. There’s no way of insulating children from the religion of their parents, though, so we’ll have to wait a few more generations to see what happens when the U.S. has a majority of Nones.
We’ve had the discussion about the meaning of “code” in other threads here with other creationists. It always comes down to an equivocation. What is your operational definition of “code”?
I’m glad to hear you admit that. The logical conclusion from this is that codes (however you’re defining that word) can arise without intelligence.
By the way, you do know that the genetic code predates the appearance of humans, right?
Your logical fallacy is (still) argument from personal incredulity.
To give the complete picture, the Soviet government did attempt to get kids to rat on their parents. I know from personal observation that this doesn’t work in child abuse cases. Children can seldom be coaxed into reporting their parents for abuse, even when injuries are obvious.
So apparently it doesn’t work for religion either.
If the only empirically verified cause of codes is human intelligence, and if the genetic code is a code in precisely the same literal sense that (e.g.) Morse code is a code, then DNA must have been caused by a human being.
And since the genetic code is billions of years old, there is only one empirically verified source: time-traveling human beings.
The only known source of intelligence that can create nuclear chain reactions in the universe is human.
Therefore, we know that a source outside of the universe made the Gabon nuclear chain reactions–reactors–a couple of billion years ago.
What am I missing? Oh, just the fact that assuming that only intelligence causes certain things, like nuclear chain reactions or the “DNA code,” is a completely unwarranted assumption. Yes I know, the fact that you believe that it’s all just too much for evolution is very important because it just happens to agree with your religious proclivities.
The reason we don’t go for made-up entities and causes is precisely because it makes warranted conclusions–like that the nuclear fission and the DNA code are not the result of intelligence–useless, all because someone prefers to make up a cause from “outside the universe.” The reasonable conclusion from the fact that humans couldn’t have made the DNA code is that intelligence wasn’t required to make the DNA code. The unreasonable conclusion is that it was due to magic, resources outside of the universe, or harmonic convergences, whatever your flavor of BS.
I’d like to see you defending your client accused of murder. It’s been shown conclusively that he and only he was with the victim when he was knifed. Your brilliant argument is that your client simply could not have done it, as murder is completely foreign to his mind, and since no other human murdered him either, it was due to “resources from outside of the universe.”
That way, you’re going to get as far as a lawyer as Bill Cole does as a scientist. Nowhere at all.
Glen Davidson
That doesn’t follow.
“The only empirically verified cause of codes is human” is far weaker than “the only cause of codes is human”. Your conclusion needs the second of those. The first is not enough.
Do you question it or do you dispute it? The latter, I guess. You need more than an assertion for that. You need rigorous definitions, first of all.
So? Religious practices that persist, are they indoctrination? Specifically, are they indoctrination when they are sporadic whereas counter-indoctrination is overwhelming?
You are nowhere near disputing the fact that religious indoctrination is out of the question in the circumstances of direct persecution. Particularly when the persecution targets sweepingly anything that remotely resembles an instance of religious indoctrination.
Yes, easy and safe. But also insufficient according to religious doctrine. Religious doctrine is not a matter of majority layman opinion, but of theological expertise.
Kantian Naturalist,
This is a very cleaver thought.
One issue is that humans are not close to being able to code a genome de novo or without looking at another genome as a reference. Now lets say we are a thousand years in the future and we understand matter much better than we do now and we can create a code de novo then time travel will allow life to be seeded. The question then becomes, were did the future beings come from. We are now back to Aquinas’s infinite regress problem and the necessity of an uncaused cause to not invoke a logic problem.
Neil Rickert,
Yes, you’re correct. I’m trying to parse out colewd’s entailments, based on his commitments.
The standard ID argument is that since we observe intelligence to be used in the creation of codes, and since DNA is a code, then we should conclude that intelligence was used in the creation of DNA.
But this clearly invalid.
The first premise, to be correct, would have to be that we only observe human intelligence to be used in creation of codes. That is, if observation is really doing all the work here, then it cannot just be “intelligence” in the abstract. It has to be what human beings actually do when they invent codes. It has to be what Samuel Morse did when he invented Morse code, for example.
So then the argument has to be: since we only observe human beings to be inventing codes, and since DNA is a code, then the only plausible source for the origin of DNA is human beings.
In fact what ID should really be doing is figuring out what exactly people are doing when they create a code. There needs to be an empirical science of code-making. And then ID can say, “DNA came about through a process exactly like that!”
To reiterate: we don’t observe “intelligence”. We observe patterns of intelligent behavior, under specific conditions, being carried by specific kinds of beings, to solve certain kinds of problems. Under some conditions, the problem to be solved requires creating a code.
In the absence of a detailed explanation of how exactly people create codes, the IDist has nothing of scientific significance to offer. This is why all of ID thus far rests on estimated probabilities. An estimation of probabilities is (1) only an expression of the assumptions that go into the estimates, as per Bayes’ Theorem and (2) not a scientific theory in any sense at all.
John Harshman,
Goalpost movement is changing the original subject. The original subject is, Keith’s being supernatural.
You are right that to explain the origin of human DNA you need to explain the origin of life if you take universal common descent as an a priori assumption. This issue is not a change of subject, it is to fully explain the origin of human DNA you need to explain the origin of DNA itself and unlimitedly the origin of matter.
The interesting point is when does the explanation require resources out side our universe?
An infinite regress is not a *logical* problem.
I’m only following through on the consequences of your assumption. You are assuming that the only known source of codes is intelligence. But that’s false. The only known source of codes is human intelligence.
If you wanted to say, “ok, so the source of DNA couldn’t have been human intelligence, so it must have been some other kind of intelligent being,” then ID is right back into being an argument from analogy. Yet IDists have always denied that it’s an argument from analogy, because they realize how weak analogical reasoning is.
colewd,
Who is right? Brad or Jenny?
No, explaining the origin of human DNA doesn’t require explaining the origin of matter. Demanding an explanation the origin of human DNA and then saying that you still need to explain matter IS textbook moving the goalposts.
Imagine a judge asking a suspect of a crime what she was doing the day of the crime. She provides all the relevant information and unmistakable evidence that she was on holiday in Hawaii.
“Cool, but you still need to explain how you got there, and I need a detailed account of all your moves since you were born, or else you’re guilty”
Kantian Naturalist,
Thats right if you restrict your search for cause to the material universe. The ID argument is highlighting that this restriction is problematic.
dazz,
This was not the discussion. The discussion is, is keith’s supernatural. If we are simply explaining this the original subject has not changed. Moving the goal posts is changing the content of the original argument. Supporting the argument in detail is fair game. DNA is made of matter and so the origin of its molecules is part a complete explanation.
colewd,
You tell us.
Kantian Naturalist,
I agree with you that ID is an argument from analogy. What I don’t agree with is that this automatically makes ID a weak argument.
I am certainly open if you can support the claim that arguments from analogy are always weak.
Allan Miller,
My current opinion is that all unique DNA sequences that have new gene sequences and new regulatory sequences require “outside” resources. This thing we call life was a big project 🙂
Kantian Naturalist,
In addition to an argument from analogy it is an argument against Darwin’s claim that life can be built from small incremental change. An example is Behe’s argument for the irreducible complexity of protein micro machines.
Especially hiding all of that design in apparently evolved genetic material.
Faking evolution was almost certainly as difficult to do as designing life in the first place.
The mind boggles–at the efforts used to avoid the obvious inferences from the evidence.
Glen Davidson
You’re actually not.
Kantian Naturalist,
We are looking for the cause of what we are observing. You are right we don’t observe intelligence, we observe the output that can be assigned to an intelligent cause.
Estimation of probabilities are used to eliminate causes that are unlikely or establish causes that are likely.
colewd,
I look forward to seeing your estimates in the case of evolution. What are you waiting for?
I would be wrong to say that if indeed I had said it, which I didn’t.
You seem to be claiming that in order to explain anything you must first explain the origin of the universe. If that were true, science would never get anywhere. Baby steps. First, you need to establish that the differences between humans and chimps need a supernatural explanation. For this, the origin of the universe is not necessary.
Why not just say “Jesus”? We all know that’s what you’re thinking, and it takes less effort to type. Honesty is a virtue. Now you’re the person claiming that the human genome, specifically, and the origin of various human qualities, is what you want to explain. You’re the one who imagines that this sort of thing would have to be done by poofing, whether with or without a reference model. Talking about the origin of life or the universe is merely a transparent attempt to deflect attention from your claims.
keiths,
I am enjoying your discussion more with Eric on philosophy and mathematics.
We can table the discussion whether you are supernatural or not 🙂
colewd,
Are you kidding? We’re finally getting to the heart of the matter. You wrote:
Let’s see your estimates. You know, the ones you used to decide that evolution was unlikely and that “outside resources” were needed.
.
John Harshman,
John the argument is whether Keiths is supernatural. This is more of a philosophical discussion then a scientific one. Can Keiths explain his existence purely by material evidence?
keiths,
How is this going to help settle the supernatural status of Keiths?
This is a question nearly without meaning. You’re the one who raised the question of explaining the human genome. The reason you brought it up is tangential to the fact that you are now running away from that question. If it’s purely philosophical, why mention science at all? And why suppose that Keith’s possible inability to explain his existence would argue that he is supernatural, whatever that means?
colewd,
Easy. If the human genome can’t be produced without the assistance of supernatural resources, then neither can keiths.
You claimed:
Let’s see the probability estimates you used to determine that humans, and by implication keiths, had a supernatural origin.
Or you could admit that you don’t have any. No one will be surprised.
keiths,
How do you think keiths genome can be made with only material causes? The easy answer is keiths parents and we know the cause 🙂 The next question is how did the human genome originate. Two possibilities on the table are a shared ancestor with Apes if you believe in common descent or a supernatural cause. So one of the possibilities tells us that Keiths is supernatural.
If you believe in the theory of universal common descent then the human genome is was constructed of 4 billion years of evolution and the cause was LUCA and ultimately origin of life. If you believe in limited common ancestor then a supernatural cause of keiths was sometime prior to the of man possibly at the origin of mammals.
If you fully believe in universal common ancestry then the possible supernatural cause of keiths was at the point life began.
If you believe in abiogenesis then the possible supernatural origin of keiths was at the big bang where the beginning of some of keiths atoms were formed.
So, intuitively,there is a very small probability of a fully natural origin of keiths.
Keiths is most likely supernatural 🙂
colewd,
You really don’t realise how utterly stupid that is, do you?
He really doesn’t realize it, and he really can’t realize it. Some people just cannot be taught. Their ability to comprehend ideas is far too damaged.