In popular parlance, “child abuser” is just about the worst thing you can call anyone. So you can imagine my shock when I read the latest comments on one of my own recent threads and found one commenter accusing another of child abuse – a charge he repeated in the Moderation thread. My astonishment grew when I read of a proposal in Moderation to ban child abusers from The Skeptical Zone, on the grounds that people who post porn are already banned, and child abuse is much, much worse.
And what was the alleged offense? Here it is: “admitting to using strawman arguments, fallacious reasoning, and false claims to destroy childrens’ ability to think rationally about certain scientific topics. That’s child abuse.” Except that the person accused made no such admission. Regardless of whether the arguments were fallacious or not, no deceit was involved. It was the accuser who attacked the arguments as fallacious and illogical, not the person he accused.
And what were the arguments about? In a nutshell, abiogenesis. The arguments were presented to a group of six-year-old children and their parents, in an attempt to make them see that the origin of life from non-living matter is astronomically improbable, that macroevolution (e.g. fish to bird) is also vanishingly improbable, and that Intelligent Design is the only rational inference. A detailed description of the presentation can be found here.
I’d like to make a couple of very brief points. First, the term “child abuse” can be defined in three ways. First, could be defined very broadly to mean behavior which actually causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. Second, it could be defined more narrowly to mean behavior which is intended to cause severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. Third, it could be defined as behavior which the vast majority of responsible people, at the present time, would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children.
The first definition is clearly ridiculous, as it would make all of our parents or grandparents child abusers. Think of passive smoking. Or think of spanking: fifty years ago, it was quite common for naughty children to get their little bottoms hit with a belt and sent to bed without supper. The second definition is also unsatisfactory, as it would exonerate parents who refused to take their dying child to a doctor, but took her to a quack faith healer instead: here, the parents didn’t mean to harm their child, but any sensible person would say that they should have known better. That leaves us with the third definition.
So the question that concerns us is: does teaching a child a fallacious argument – assuming that it was fallacious – designed to prove that abiogenesis is well-nigh impossible constitute behavior which the vast majority of responsible would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to a child? The response to that question should be bleeding obvious: you’ve got to be kidding me. Clearly the person making the ridiculous accusation needs to grow up.
I’d also point out that the person in question actually not only accused a TSZ commenter of child abuse, but also accused him of admitting to it:
Mung,
You seem very, very, upset that I am pointing out that [name redacted]’s real life behavior constitutes child abuse. A good example of him admitting to this is in the thread starting here.
I have to say that’s libelous. The accused person merely admitted to using certain arguments to persuade children. He made no admission of committing child abuse. As I showed above, the only reasonable definition of child abuse is: behavior which the vast majority of responsible people, at the present time, would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. The accused person did not admit to engaging in such behavior; on the contrary, he emphatically denied it.
I think a retraction is in order. And I might add: the accuser is very lucky that the person he accused belongs to a religion that enjoins its followers to “forgive other people when they sin against you” (Matthew 6:14), turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:40) and “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). Very lucky indeed.
And how fallacious were the arguments, anyway? I’ll let readers judge. There was an everyday observation that “dead dogs stay dead dogs,” used to support the conclusion that “life does not come from non-life except by a miracle.” Pasteurization was also cited as evidence against abiogenesis. My response: those are valid points. They don’t demonstrate abiogenesis to be impossible, but the person accused was not trying to establish that. The argument he was making was a rhetorical one, not a rigorously deductive one which you might expect to hear in a college classroom.
There was another argument to the effect that fish don’t evolve into birds because fish give birth to fish. A little simplistic, perhaps, but it’s certainly strong prima facie evidence against macroevolution. Fortunately for evolutionists, there is good fossil evidence for the evolution of fish into tetrapods, some of which later evolved into birds. Scientists therefore have good reason to believe that it happened, but they still can’t demonstrate a mechanism for how it happened, and they still don’t know why it happened. What they have instead are some promising hypotheses which (unfortunately) have not yet been quantified in order to establish that the transition could have taken place over the timescale involved. And I hardly think most parents would consider it “child abuse” to omit to mention the existence of Archaeopteryx in a presentation aimed at six-year-olds, especially when there is an ongoing debate over that fossil’s place in evolution: some scientists argue that it was neither a bird nor an ancestor of modern birds (or even a close relative of that ancestor).
Third, there was an argument relating to a large cup of coins, in which the presenter asked the children to guess whether they would all turn up heads when shaken (answer: “NO.”) The accuser objected that it would have been fairer to ask a child to put all the coins that came up tails back in her cup and shake it again, and repeat the process again and again. But in this case, it it the accuser’s understanding of evolution which is faulty: it is a process that lacks foresight, so it cannot select for a distant, long-term result. Score a point to the presenter.
Fourth, the presenter showed the children videos of Rube Goldberg machines made by man, and then showed them videos of living things, telling the children that they are Rube Goldberg machines, too. That’s arguably true, as far as it goes. Consider the following sentence, taken from a textbook titled, Cell and Molecular Biology: Concepts and Experiments by Gerald Karp (John Wiley and Sons, Sixth edition, 2009): “Cellular activities are often analogous to this ‘Rube Goldberg’ machine, in which one event automatically triggers the next event in a reaction sequence” (p. 7). There are also scholarly papers discussing how such biological Rube Goldberg machines might have evolved – but once again, without any quantification of the degree of difficulty or the time that would have been involved. Is it “child abuse” to neglect to mention these plausible but speculative papers to a class of six-year-olds? No: it’s what lawyers call advocacy.
Finally, the presenter invoked Pascal’s Wager, when giving talks to college students (not six-year-olds):
I then teach them Pascal’s wager and point out, they have less to lose by being wrong about ID and God’s creation than their Christ-hating professors, therefore it’s worth stepping out in a little faith if that’s what they want to do.
I suggest that if they worry the professors are right, I suggest they ask them these sorts of questions. When they see their professors can’t answer, they often say, “then why do they teach evolution is true, they have no proof.” My point exactly.
The accuser’s sharp retort to this exposition was: “I suspect you neglect to mention the god that gets very annoyed with people who try to game it.”
Look. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, and I’m quite familiar with the many objections that have been leveled against Pascal’s wager. But I’m also well aware that the “many gods” objection which the accuser cites (alluding to the “professor’s god“) is far from decisive, and continues to be the subject of vigorous debate. [Defenders of the argument point out, for instance, that since Pascal’s God is an absolutely perfect being, Pascal’s hypothesis is simpler and hence more probable than the highly ad hoc hypothesis of a professor’s god.] And I might add that since college students are not children, there can be no question of “child abuse” in this context. These students are perfectly capable of Googling “Pascal’s wager,” as I just did.
After having examined the arguments, I can find none that constitutes “child abuse” on any reasonable definition of the term. The accuser whom I mentioned also accused the presenter of “attempting to indoctrinate children.” However, the term “indoctrinate” is a highly loaded word. Attempting to persuade children of the truth of a certain worldview, using arguments that a scholarly pedant might take exception to, cannot be fairly described as “indoctrination,” whatever one might happen to think of the arguments themselves.
To sum up: I find the accused not guilty. And I would hope that the majority of readers would agree with my verdict, which is nothing more and nothing less than a victory for common sense.
Before I conclude this post, I’d like to comment on the suggestion made by one commenter that child abusers be banned from TSZ. As we’ve seen, the term “child abuse” has been variously defined by people on this Website, so before such a rule is proposed, we need to agree on which definition of “child abuse” we’re talking about. Now, the notion of clear and present danger is well-established in American constitutional law. If you’re going to actually ban someone from a site encouraging the free discussion of ideas, then I would suggest that your reason for doing so should be a compelling one. If, on the other hand, the suggestion is simply that contributors with a criminal history of child abuse be banned from TSZ, then that sounds much more reasonable. As for the banning of porn: irrespective of how much harm someone may think it does, the practical rationale for banning it should be obvious. Most people think it’s an annoying nuisance. The same goes for spam.
I shall lay down my pen here, and invite readers to contribute their thoughts. I’ve said my piece.
(Image at the top courtesy of all-free-download.com and BSGStudio.)
And nobody is teaching that there’s evidence for any primordial soup. Why the need to misrepresent the facts? Just another instance of creationist projection right there. Science is speculative in nature, you speculate what might explain something, adding as much explanatory power as possible, to then go and collect evidence to either support or reject the hypothesis.
I didn’t see this coming from you Vince. You know those things but somehow you prefer to take sides with Sal by adopting some of the same fallacious BS arguments he uses.
Shame on you
vjtorley,
The mysterious masked Uncommon Descent author that introduced the clip comments on it thus:
Is it really lying to say it is a work in progress? Has precisely zero progress been made?
Nobel Prize Winning Chemist says: Stop Looking, You Are Wasting Your Time.
Meantime, it is FAR too early to say that large portions of the genome serve no apparent function!
A good one for fans of irony. I await the turnaround ‘but YOU …’.
Torley in that UD article:
“the outlandish theory that the Earth was seeded by aliens (panspermia), which merely pushes back the question of life’s origin”
Panspermia isn’t about aliens seeding life on earth, it proposes that life on Earth might have had an extra terrestrial origin
More stupid creationists caricatures and straw men arguments. Torley recommends Tour’s presentation for students. That’s the kind of thing that teaches kids to think fallaciously
And then one of my pet peaves, let’s say we found evidence one day that the first living forms came from outer space in a meteor or something, is that simply pushing the problem one step further? It is NOT just that, finding evidence in support of a theory like that would EXPLAIN some important stuff, but that doesn’t matter to creationists, they are not interested in knowledge that conflicts with their religious beliefs
One of my high school teachers told us that every time science finds an answer, many more new questions arise. I find it so fucking inspiring. Creotards OTOH dismiss it as pushing the problem one step further. Pathetic
Just 2 minutes into the presentation and Tour is already lying through his teeth:
This is what Torley wants to be taught to children, disgusting.
Absolutely correct. “Natural rights” are supposed to have been “endowed by the creator.” This is another area of patrickian blindness/deafness. He’s one of the most religious posters here.
I take it his “strict constitutionalism” is in its ascendancy at present. The Trump/Pence gang will give Patrick just what he wants with their upcoming SCOTUS appointment. YAY!!!
And Patrick’s Trumpian anti-regulation desires are also on the road to being fulfilled :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/america-before-the-epa-documerica_us_5886ebc5e4b070d8cad5211d?o5d4ihlsfmmo0f6r&
Lots of pipe lines and no environmental protections!! Double YAY!!!!!
God Bless the TSZ moderators!
BTW Vincent, if God is not bound to keep the laws of nature, there’s no reason to believe that he couldn’t have done anything regardless of what natural laws are in place. He could have created a universe just like this with every conceivable set of laws and constants.
Clearly this nullifies the fine tuning argument. I can see you have quite a few articles at UD defending the FT argument.
Perhaps a retraction is in order?
I believe you’re going to heaven, VJ. God bless you.
All that the thief on the cross could offer to Jesus with the remaining hours of his life was a life full of bad choices and that he believed in Jesus.
All the thief on the cross had left was Pascal’s wager. My detractors criticize me over Pascal’s wager, but what do they have to offer someone like the thief on the cross?
I respect atheists and their fine minds, most especially Bertrand Russell. But ironically Russell himself in A Free Man’s Worship was the impetus for my return to faith when I nearly left it.
Why? An atheistic viewpoint has not much to offer someone with regrets and life of choices he’d like to have back and not much time to live. If Jesus is who he said he is, the thief on the cross played his cards very well since really, at that point he had nothing to lose. At some level, I could see everyone’s life and my own through the lens of the thief on the cross.
It seems to me the Lord wasn’t too particular about every theological idea that the thief on the cross held, and so likewise I believe he will grant grace freely to those who will receive him. So if you have received Jesus into your heart, you will go to heaven. God bless you.
stcordova,
In a word, you believe because it makes you feel good: you can’t believe the world would be ultimately unpleasant in spite of your wishes.
At least you’re honest about this.
Actually, if the Christian God is real, it will be sad for most of humanity. The doctrine of hell is one I wish were not true.
I explored the issue here:
Sal has admitted to going beyond teaching simply fallacious arguments, althought that’s bad enough when he knows full well they are fallacious. His strawman representations of science aren’t simply wrong, they are deliberate distortions made with the intent of preventing children from learning real science in the future.
His indoctrination techniques are intellectually and emotionally abusive.
The evidence supporting those arguments is a matter of observation.
Hi dazz,
You write:
No such luck. God could have created a life-supporting universe in any number of ways, without any fine-tuning, but the mere existence of life (or even intelligent life) is not treated as the evidence that confirms design in the best versions of the fine-tuning argument. Rather, the fact that fine tuning is required for life, given the set of laws and fundamental constants that we have, serves as the evidence for a Designer. See this 2013 UD post of mine here:
Night Vision: A new version of the fine-tuning argument
This makes sense if the Designer had two objectives:
(i) to create a life-sustaining universe;
(ii) to create a universe whose intelligent life-forms would be able to draw the inference that it was designed (courtesy of the “fly-on-the wall” argument). Only in a fine-tuned universe could this inference be drawn on scientific grounds.
You accuse Dr. James Tour, who was rated one of the world’s top ten chemists by a Thompson Reuters citations per publication index survey in 2009, of “lying through his teeth,” despite the fact that he specifically invited scientists in the audience to interrupt him if he was lying, and to call out, “Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!” No-one did. And your scientific qualifications are ……?
By the way, do you have any empirical evidence for evolution occurring in the absence of carbohydrates, nucleic-acids, lipids and proteins? And do you have any evidence for the existence of non-cellular life-forms that can replicate and evolve on their own? Nope? I thought not.
You say that “Tour’s presentation for students… teaches kids to think fallaciously.” So I take it that you think that a parent who showed Tour’s video to their child would be guilty of child abuse? The accusations just keep getting crazier and crazier.
You write: “Is it really lying to say it is a work in progress? Has precisely zero progress been made?” OK. Think of the longest biological molecule generated in the lab by unguided natural processes that could have served as a plausible predecessor to the first living thing, back in 1990, and the longest such molecule in 2016. There isn’t much difference: right now I think the record is about two dozen atoms for some nucleotide that was synthesized under highly artificial conditions back in 2009. By comparison, the number of atoms in even the simplest bacterium numbers in the tens of millions. See here (scroll down to M. genitalium). So we’re not even a millionth of the way there. Some progress!
You also write that “the natural world itself would be in violation of natural laws given what we know, if it was 6000 years old (speed of light, etc).” Look, I think YEC is ridiculous too, but there are several qualified creation scientists who have made genuine attempts to address this problem (see here for a general overview and here for a more detailed treatment).
Finally, you write:
You can formulate Pascal’s Wager without any reference to Hell. If you believe in an infinitely loving Being Who created the cosmos, then such a Being is perfectly capable of creating a Heaven where those creatures who are capable of knowing and loving Him can enjoy His presence and be happy loving one another forever. If you don’t believe in such a Being, you have no reason to believe in Heaven. Presumably, when you die, you die, and that’s it. If the evidence from Nature is compatible with both God’s existence and God’s non-existence, then you might opt for God for the simple reason that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Indeed, Pascal’s wager is easier to formulate without Hell, because if you’re an atheist, you won’t fear Hell anyway, whereas if you’re a theist, there’s a possibility that you might go there, so believing in God might actually make you more miserable, as you’d feel like a tightrope walker in a cosmic circus act. (That, by the way, is one reason why I would argue that on purely practical grounds, we have to treat the likelihood of our going to Hell as fairly small, and as requiring a deliberate and final act of willful rejection of God, on our part. If the chance of being damned were large, and if the pit of Hell were easy to fall into, we’d all go insane from stress, and the Good News would actually be Bad News for most of us.)
Cheers.
Surely I do.
With all due respect for your courteous participation here, Robert, you have not demonstrated a detailed understanding of modern evolutionary theory in your comments. Sal Cordova, unfortunately for him, has shown that he does understand it. He knows that what he is teaching these kids is a gross distortion of science yet he does it anyway.
Patrick,
Re arguments for the age of the Earth and the universe, you write:
“The evidence supporting those arguments is a matter of observation.”
I would say: observation combined with extrapolation into the past. We have made every effort, over the past few decades, to disprove the hypothesis that radioactive isotopes decay at a constant rate, and we have failed. So it’s reasonable to infer that decay rates are constant over time. But we don’t know that. They might not be.
I thought that the wager was separate from belief, it was a pragmatic choice to act as if a deity which judged one on actions not beliefs existed. One may come to belief but that is a separate issue.
The thief really had nothing to lose by taking the wager, it wasn’t like he was going to have another opportunity to sin.
vjtorley,
So you have determined that ‘there’ is a bacterium, and the percentage of the way ‘there’ we are is determined by the proportional length of polymer presently generated? Heh. If your one model of the OoL has not borne fruit, none will.
It is not, one should note, a massively active effort, compared to the effort being perfectly reasonably invested to conquer the average disease, say, but it is incorrect to suggest that anyone is being told anything different about the degree of success made. It is, after all, a matter of freely available record.
The very fact that one could make the unsupported accusation that scientists are lying about the amount of progress made, I find rather unsavoury.
There are multiple lines of evidence
This doesn’t make any sense to me. If God could have created a life-supporting universe in any number of ways, then he could have done it with ANY set of constants or natural laws. Any argument based on the set of laws and fundamental constants that we have is therefore moot. This is a blatant contradiction on your part.
And the point flies right over your head.
First off, all it takes for evolution to be possible is imperfect replicators. I’m certainly not a scientist so I have no qualifications, so fucking what? Fallacy: argument from authority.
Tour pulled that right from his asshole.
You are simply shifting the burden of proof when you demand evidence that those things didn’t need to be there.
Let me remind you it’s James Tour who claims that “carbohydrates, nucleic-acids, lipids and proteins, ARE ALL NEEDED LONG BEFORE EVOLUTION CAN BEGIN”
where’s the evidence that carbohydrates, nucleic-acids, lipids and proteins needed to be there?
Tour emphatically affirms how clueless everyone is with regards to origins. How the fuck is he so cock sure then that such complex molecules MUST have predated evolution?
Scientist entertaining the metabolist first hypothesis certainly disagree with Tour, are you going to question their qualifications? Another instance of your fallacious cherry-picking. Tour: expert. Scientists who disagree, crickets
I think it’s “psychological abuse”, not interested in debates about word lawyering though, I’ll leave that to Mung
That was Allan, not me, so I’ll let him take care of that. I’ll paraphrase another of my favourite posters here in TSZ (petrushka) in response to that bit
Creationists always celebrating (their) ignorance (when science should be the opposite)
I couldn’t care less about Pascal Wager. I want the truth, not interested in egoistical rationalizations of beliefs I don’t hold
Genuine attempts? Creation scientists? Scientists don’t try to force the evidence to fit a predefined conclusion. Nothing genuine there as far as I can tell, not if we’re talking science
So for anyone raised in a religion which Hell is easy to fall into, Pascal’s wager would result in acting as if there is no God.
vjtorley,
What I’m going to do with this particular argument from authority is ask the guy above him … ! 😉
That is incorrect. In order to determine the age of the earth you have to know how it was formed. Your claim needs the proto-earth to be completely molten with no surviving crystals. Then when the earth cooled and crystals formed that is when the isotope clock starts. But if that didn’t happen then the clocks are based on a faulty assumption.
As opposed to you teaching kids how to do gross distortions using science?
Sal says he read Russell and the idea of a world without redemption, etc. Made him feel bad. So he decided on a different view–one that made him feel better.
He was honest about it…for a minute, which is longer than most theists can manage.
Exactly. As I said, theism is basically a theory for the weak and scared. Russell was courageous; Sal is not.
But he was honest about this for a moment (the time between his two posts), which is something.
Hey, that’s about the nicest thing someone from the opposing side has said in a long time.
See, there’s a reason you’re on my list of favorite people at TSZ. 🙂
But going back to Atheist argument against Pascal’s wager, we have the author of A manual for creating Atheists doing something that even surprised himself:
So why did he not challenge her “delusions”. Only he can answer that question, or maybe he can’t. I suppose at some level he realized she really had nothing to gain by accepting the atheist viewpoint at that stage in her life, just like the thief on the cross.
Unless Jesus returns in our lifetime, we’ll all be at that point or something similar. Will atheism be that valuable to us then? Even Boghossian, when the moment really mattered, didn’t think so — because actions speak louder than words.
So, nothing personal against atheists, and I really like Bertrand Russell’s writings, but “what’s in it for me?” is a question atheism hasn’t given me personally satisfactory answers for.
The other things is that I think there have been miraculously answered prayers in peoples lives.
As a philosophy Ph.D. you should understand that from the fact that P “might not be true” (possibly not-P) it does not follow that no one knows P. That’s simply a modal/epistemic fallacy.
There it is again in a nutshell. Thank you. If the world were made for you to be happy, theism would be true. I’ll buy that.
As an aside, somewhat related to Pascal’s Wager is the movie Holy Rollers wherein I was listed in the credits. It’s actually not that entertaining a movie, but I was surprised to discover atheist Matt Dillahunty and ID proponent Robert Marks watch it. It’s not like the documentary is well-known.
http://holyrollersthemovie.com/
But, if one wonders why I talk about Pascal’s wager a lot, I see life through the lens of principles of decision making in a world of uncertainties and incomplete knowledge (where we have far less facts available to us than we’d like). Pascal’s theories have been successfully applied in the world of economics and business.
Pascal’s wager does not prove God nor does it prove that ones probability and payoff estimates are correct. The wager is only as credible as the underlying assumptions. What it does however do is give the optimal decision if one’s premises are right. So what value is that? The value is that it provides coherency in matching ones actions to ones estimates of the probability of being right. Coherency usually counts for something.
Now, most people, even Dawkins (I think) don’t score 7.0 (full personal certainty there is no God) on Dawkins scale. Pascal’s wager at least demonstrates that relative to their own premises, they are not making decisions that are systematically coherent, or at least well-thought out like skilled gamblers (such as the Holy Rollers) would do.
In my experience atheists are smart and excellent critical thinkers. They possess a lot of qualities I admire (hence I hang around them a lot). But there are a few holes in the way they approach probability questions that entail potential payoffs and punishments. Pascal’s wager bears this out.
It’s not merely a poor assessment of probabilities. I just don’t believe.
It is certainly an abuse of Sal”s position of authority over children
Are people happy in heaven? If so, it strikes me that it must not be difficult to make.
If struggle is a good thing to have in one’s resume, it strikes me as odd that a third of all fetuses are aborted spontaneously. (That may be why some religions say ensoulment happens at quickening, rather than at conception.
Perhaps the living are channels on the heavenly cable network. A kind of gladiatorial spectacle. An amusement.
vjtorley:
Hi dazz,
And if there were no “fine-tuning,” you could just say that this is the ultimate evidence for God, since the conditions for life are poor, yet life exists. And that’s where you’d actually be right, because conditions do have to be right for life to arise without miracles, while God could dispense with all “fine-tuning.” You’re really not making any sort of case for God.
How? The only thing that’s truly indicated by the conditions for life to arise existing is that life can then arise (sans miracle) under those conditions. At that point, at least, you don’t need to invoke anything else, you’ve got the universe capable of giving rise to life. I suppose that God could have fine-tuned the universe after all, but you’d need some good evidence for it, not your simple leap from “fine-tuning” to “God.”
Which proves?
Oh right, nothing.
And your scientific qualifications are?
We can rule out “arguing reasonably” from any list of scientific qualifications. Your egregious argumentum ad verecundiam doesn’t inspire confidence.
Your empirical evidence that they’re necessary? Right, none, just like Tour. Start dealing with the actual hypotheses for OoL, and quit with the strawman versions.
And are you going to supply ancient life to us to study? If not, try dealing fairly with the arguments, rather than demanding of others what you most certainly don’t have.
Then quit with the leap to strawmen.
Wow, tens of millions of atoms in the simplest bacterium. Far more in a pebble. See the connection? Thought not. Why don’t you discuss these things? No new ideas? No work on replication of proto-cells? No, your count of atoms in molecules doesn’t constitute the whole of the research being done, and you have no right to pretend that it does.
Wow, some fallacy.
Have you noticed their successes?
Why are you defending egregious nonsense with your non sequiturs?
Which is more honest, trying to find out what the most probable answer is, or trying to fit your answer to possible consequences if you’re wrong?
Not really a poser.
Glen Davidson
There are people in heaven? Really?
No, Allan. In the video he says the exact opposite of that.
Probably the same reason he would not have refused her morphine on the basis that she might become addicted.
Jesus and Mary
And it’s reasonable to infer that the sun is powered by nuclear fusion. But we don’t know that. It might not be.
Yes, anything might not be. Hume. Welcome to induction, or inference (same problem, actually, whichever term is used).
The question is what is reasonable, not whether anything is absolutely established. Nothing empirical is absolutely established, even though we might rely on F=ma with great confidence.
Is it reasonable to doubt an old earth? No, it is not. It wasn’t prior to radiometric dating, and it is all the less so now. We have concordance of different methods of radiometric dating. The oldest dates for the solar system agree roughly with the expected stage that the sun is in after around four or five billion years. The interior of the earth has cooled by several hundred degrees, judging by the differences in magmatic output. That takes a very long time.
The young earth makes no sense from a geologic standpoint (the geologic column), from the sun’s apparent age, from evolutionary processes and their dating (not exact, but one can hardly go from bacteria and archaea to elephants very quickly), from the climatic forcing by orbital and precessional changes that are visible in isotopes, from the cooling of the earth (by the way, cooling of the ocean floors is roughly in-line with radiometric dating, another check), and from the existence of processes that could only occur over millions of years, like the late heavy bombardment and the orbital changes that caused it.
Deal with the evidence rather than cavilling over the lack of absolute certainty of things. Your defense of the indefensible is wearing mighty thin.
Glen Davidson
So if someone offered you a million dollars to be an atheist would that change you calculation? 100 million? Then the bet becomes a known vs an unknown
Maybe you were watching it backwards
In the same way that all life is equally evolved, all life is equally ancient.
There’s a very easy counter argument for the fine tuning argument that also exposes this nonsense above.
Looks a lot like the Euthyphro dilemma: Is this combination of laws and constants the only life permitting one (assuming it is) because God made them that way or did God pick this combination because any other combination would make life impossible?
If the former, then fine tuning is an illusion, because any other conceivable set of laws and constants would produce a universe like ours if so God wanted.
If the latter then fine-tuning works, but God can’t be the author of the natural laws themselves: they stand on their own. At best God could only be a handyman following a cosmic “user guide” to build fine-tuned, life permitting universes. This is a God that doesn’t get to decide how nature works (because the laws are independent of him), can’t intervene or suspend natural laws (because if he could, he could suspend other universes’ laws to allow life to exist) and couldn’t perform miracles if those involve breaking the laws of nature (resurrections, walking on water, multiplying stuff…) This is a God than can’t account for the natural laws, so in that regard it’s just pushing the problem one step further
Mung,
So he’s offering words of encouragement to the researchers? Seek and Ye Shall Find? Jolly good.
Hi Glen Davidson,
There are plenty of good scientific reasons to support belief in an old earth. If the question were a purely scientific one, then that should settle it. But it isn’t. If the universe is not a self-explanatory system, but requires a supernatural Being to sustain it (as many scientists and philosophers believe), and if (as Sal believes) this Being revealed to us that the age of the Earth is 6,000 years, then that revelation trumps the scientific evidence, because it’s straight from the Maker’s mouth. Of course, we need to ask whether there is any such evidence for such a revelation, and we also need to ask whether we’ve correctly understood such a revelation, assuming that it’s genuine. Both of these are major epistemic hurdles, but one could imagine (in principle) evidence that would satisfy a skeptic on both counts.
That being the case, belief in a young Earth could be reasonable in some circumstances, despite the mountain of scientific evidence to the contrary.
There are no agreed rules of evidence for assessing purported revelations from God, or for interpreting said revelations. You might consider Sal’s position bizarre, but you can’t prove it’s irrational, and neither can I. All you can do (as I do) is go by your own lights, look at the Biblical evidence, and conclude that the case for a 6,000-year-old Earth is less than compelling, whereas the scientific evidence for an old earth is very compelling indeed. But both of us might be wrong.
By the way, my empirical evidence that carbohydrates, nucleic-acids, lipids and proteins are necessary for life is very clear: millions of species of terrestrial organisms, and not one without these compounds. You can hypothesize ancient organisms that didn’t need them until the cows come home, but until scientists can actually make such an organism in the lab and observe it replicating and evolving, you don’t really have any evidence that these compounds aren’t necessary to life.
Dr. James Tour isn’t the only eminent scientist who is skeptical of abiogenesis. The late Dr. Richard Smalley (winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996) became convinced of its impossibility, late in life (see here). Maybe they’re both wrong, but their arguments have not been answered to date, and they certainly deserve a respectful hearing.
vjtorley,
Such relativism.
Glen Davidson
Even Homer Simpson can refute Pascal’s Wager:
The “many gods” objection. Positively old hat. Duh, Homer.
One problem here is that “at a constant rate” has no actual meaning.
We can talk of “at a constant rate with respect to metric M”. But we cannot talk of constant rate without reference to some sort of metric.
Regarding the Homer Simpson complaint, it is valid, but it doesn’t invalidate Pascal’s wager, and a little thought will bear this out.
I’ve yet to see an atheist methodically take their own probability and payoff estimates and come up with a coherent positive Expected Value (EV). If they did attempt to calculate their own estimate of EV, it might result in a proof by contradiction, and lead to the conclusion the atheist position is inherently disadvantageous for most atheists if they listed out their own probability/payoff/EV table. It might look like this:
P(Chrstianity True) * Reward (Christiantity True) = EV (Christianity True)
P (Islam True) * Reward (Islam True) = EV (Islam True)
P (JuJu of the Sea True) * Reward (JuJu of the Sea True) = EV (JuJu of the Sea True)
P (Buddism True) * Reward (Buddism True) = EV (Buddism True)
P( Atheism true) * Reward (Atheism True) = EV (Atheism True ) = 0
P(other true) * Reward (Other True) = EV (Other True)
etc.
The computation can be amended to include punishments like Hell. Because Christianity and Islam have hell, then Homer Simpson’s concerns are exactly right. In that case, the correct wager would be on which religion has a better probability of being right.
But has any atheist who has criticized my use of Pascal’s wager published their own personal probability/payoff/EV tables?
I think Dawkins ranks himself 6.9 on a sale of 7 on his own scale of confidence that God does not exist. That is to say a chance of 0.1 out of 7 or, 1 out of 70.
People in the USA (often by law) will by 6-month term automobile insurance for events which actuaries could easily estimate are in the ball park of 1 in 1000. So in Dawkins’ estimate the probability of God being real is more than someone’s chances of getting into a car accident over the next six months. With those considerations, one would think he’d be a little more cautious and buy some insurance (figuratively speaking). At the very least that means not angering the Christian God and trying to keep little kids from believing in the Christian God like Patrick is doing, since that would make the Christian God especially angry.
But, no atheist I know of has systematically worked through their own probability/payoff/EV table and shown me that even if I were them, they are making a mathematically sound wagering decision. Hence, though they may object to my use of Pascal’s wager, they’ve not offered compelling to arguments to the contrary as far as I’m personally concerned.
The issue is moot for me because I’m a believer. It really is more of a problem for atheists to make their own probability/payoff/EV tables work for them, which I don’t see them doing, just deferring and ignoring.
Like I say, it’s not about probabilities at all. Whatever the probablility Christianity is true (how fortunate for those lucky souls born in Christian countries!), I don’t believe a word of it.
If that’s punishable by Hell, I add contempt to disbelief. But more contempt for people who think that’s OK (“Hey! I don’t make the rules!”). They can watch me fry.
Many theists also haven’t run their numbers. Namely those smart enough to know that pulling figures out of one’s ass is a futile exercise