Michael Todd has joined our discussion, and makes the assumption in the title of this thread. Michael introduced himself with “Greetings all. I’m new here. I’m also a Christian.”
Here’s the rest of what Michael said in that comment:
I assume most here are atheistic materialists. Fine. However, the dilemma is yours. Why? Glad you asked. Materialistic determinism. Everything that happens, according to the necessary tenets of your creed, is a result of the properties inherent in matter. This would include all of your mental life – personality, memory, and perceptions. This would mean that all of your assertions are nothing more than expressions of an unrelenting matter/energy cascade.
The discussion started by Michael will be moved to this new thread.
Go read a book Mung.
Is that Right Joe?
You did with the terms “true” and “false”.
If instead you mean “truth” in a religious way, then please tell me who believes most certainly that they know the “truth”, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or Sikhs.
Let’s not leave out Mormons, Catholics, Muslims and Scientologists. Which religion is the true one?
The one that says, “Mine!”, the loudest. 🙂
I have a rather obvious question to the theists posting here. Does it matter which religion is true? Are they all true? Does it matter whether you pray to the Christian God or to Zeus?
This is backwards. People here tend not to respect ID because it is not testable, says nothing useful, suggests no helpful research, and is not science. Those who were banned from UD, were banned for making exactly these arguments. In other words, people here aren’t against ID because they were banned, they were banned for being against ID.
And ALL the hostility toward ID is based on the dishonest attempts to position ID as science and demand that it be treated as such, when it is not science in any way. If it were positioned as a religious doctrine, nobody here would have any more problem with it than they do with the Hindu pantheon.
And finally, the hostility isn’t toward ID as a philosophy, it’s toward the philosophy of ID being dishonestly claimed to be science. People here are attempting to defend science against con artists claiming their scams are scientific.
I think we’re decoding the words incorrectly. When non-ID people speak of something being true, they are thinking in terms of something being demonstrably correct. When ID people speak of truth, they are talking about Received Absolute Truth irrespective of evidence (whatever that is!).
I suggest a change of terminology. True and false should be regarded as absolute terms relative to religious doctrine. Correct and incorrect are better used for scientific findings or with respect to objective reality. The TRUE spirit of atheistic materialism is to deny the God of ID. The CORRECT spirit of atheistic materialism is to be curious about how things work.
I prefer saying that knowledge is reliable or not. Reliability is a concept that lends itself to being expressed as a percentage. Most scientific findings have error bars and confidence intervals.
Everything in life is a matter of percentages. Certainty exists in fantasy.
The point is that when a creationist says evolution is not true, he doesn’t mean the theory is incorrect on the merits, he means it MUST be incorrect because it does not accord with TRUTH. Which has nothing to do with empirical correctness.
Still, the point about error bars is a good one. You can be Absolutely Certain, or you can be probably correct, but you can’t be both. Science can prove hypotheses incorrect, but never prove them correct. It can only lend a little more support and reduce the error bars incrementally.
It’s only that absolute truths are so comforting. Those who live by them may be wrong, but they are never in doubt.
This whole thread starts with the fallacy of appeal to consequences. About 90 percent of the discussion at UD centers around the moral implications of evolution.
So yes, they start with the assumption that evolution implies something about the creator/designer that is more repugnant than deliberate creation of disease and predation.
Does it matter whether you pray to the one true God or to a rock?
I guess it depends on the results you want to achieve.
What does “truth in a religious way” mean?
Do you think religious people mean something different when they say true or false or truth than Neil does when he says:
I’m already reading too many. Don’t really have room for yet another. Sorry.
So they went to UD because they were against ID, got banned, came here, but the people who congregate here aren’t by and large anti ID. We certainly should not say this blog is against ID.
Sorry, finding that hard to swallow.
That’s the question I ask of you. What exactly is the difference in outcome, and how do you know which of the many One True Gods is the real thing?
M Todd,
FWIW: I have a Catholic understanding of the physical and spiritual. That means that the observable world accessible to science really does appear to be the result of matter and energy alone — but there is more to the world that can be empirically detected. Granted, it’s a matter of faith, but that is how it should be.
I too was banned from UD — in particular for not accepting as unequivocally true that a planet could exist and not exist at the same moment.
While only a possibility, one of the ways Quantum indeterminacy may manifest itself is by a wave function in which each moment of reality is created by the previous moment’s information. Furthermore, said information will necessarily will be incomplete, hence the introduction of “randomness”. Thus the existence of a planet at t1, from the vantage point of t0, is indeterminate (though heavily weighted in favor of “continued” existence).
Having said that, I also admitted that many physicists have the philosophically view that reality at its core is in fact determinate (though our empirical view is obscured by quantum physics). Even so, merely acknowledging that there is sufficient reason to doubt the causal reality of nature was enough to earn banishment.
KF in particular can not accept any argument that diverges from classical causality. That was good enough in Newton’s day, but science turned away from that view a century ago because empirical evidence indicated a more nuanced causality. I don’t know what ID makes of all of this, but UD is decidedly anti-indeterminacy.
The real problem with UD is that it fears ideas so much that it cannot tolerate even momentary exposure to dissenting opinions.
It is quite one thing to turn the hounds loose to bait and ridicule opponents. That’s pretty much the way internet discussion goes. What distinguishes UD is its willingness to remove ideas, even edit posts.
I’ve seen a lot of odd webmasters, by Barry Arrington is the only one I’ve seen who deliberately baits members and eggs them into supplying the wrong answer.
The fiasco over quantum indeterminacy was just one of several. such episodes.
Being opposed to teaching ID as science is not the same as being unwilling to consider evidence. In fact you have been provided your own thread in which you are invited to provide evidence for ID.
We are waiting.
No, it doesn’t, since the results are exactly the same in either case.
Just by chance I happened to be looking in on that pogrom when it occurred.
It is especially peculiar given their many bizarre sectarian beliefs about the nature of their supernatural beings.
Not only are these beliefs not subject to being questioned, they can’t even be investigated. There is no possible handle one can get on them in order to demonstrate whether or not they are true.
They allow themselves the luxury of proof by assertion for their own claims about the supernatural; but at the same time they make it clear that there is no amount of objective, scientific evidence that will ever convince them of anything they don’t want to believe about the natural universe.
Proof of their claims by bald assertion, and refutation of the claims of others simply by flat denial (and punishment wherever possible); it’s a rigged power game of dominance that arbitrary authoritarians love to play.
They also appear to have taken on a couple of low-minded muggers who are doing the job of hurling feces and insults at anyone who dares question the sanctimonious authority figures over there. I have to admit that I don’t see the attraction of actually spending time mud wrestling endlessly over there.
Mike Todd:
This pseudoscientific babble has been stale for at least half a century. Why on Earth do you, guys, pay attention to such silliness?
Reductionism of this most naive sort barely works even in physics. You can deduce the properties of protons and neutrons from quantum chromodynamics. But take a metal and you’ll find that its properties do not boil down to the physics of individual quarks, gluons, and electrons. You need to introduce entirely new concepts such as rigidity, which have nothing to do whatsoever with the properties of individual subatomic particles. A quark does not possess rigidity and neither does an atom. You need a macroscopic number of atoms to get there.
And I am not even talking about chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, and physiology, all of which rely on entirely new levels of knowledge not present in the “more reductionist” layers of science. The naive reductionism that Todd describes goes nowhere fast.
petrushka,
This is demonstrably false and is refuted by the testimony of your own members. But don’t let that stop you!
rhampton7:
The reductionist program is dead. You didn’t get the news?
Information – is that one of those things that cannot be empirically detected? Is information just the result of matter and energy alone?
Of course information is just the result of matter and energy alone.
Why, what else do you think it could possibly be the result of? Divine revelation?
Okay, then, how would divine revelation manifest itself to us? Only in moving matter and energy!
Do you honestly think there is some kind of non-material, non-energetic “information” which could somehow be immaterially-and-non-energetically injected into a cell and which then could somehow interact with the obviously material/energy substance of the cell to make the cell do what the “information” required it to do? Honestly?
Heh. You need to stop trying to fool yourself.
There is no Divine Revelation.
P.S. if you happen to hear god actually “talking” to you, you should probably seek professional help.
Mike:
Barry is a hypocrite’s hypocrite. After banning people for saying that the law of non-contradiction might not always apply in the case of quantum physics, Barry claimed that it didn’t apply to God:
Needless to say, Barry did not ban himself.
That’s the opinion of UprightBiped.
Quoting UprightBiped:
So yes, information is always instantiated in matter or energy. I thought the ID side had reached agreement on this.
Was Michael Todd just a drive-by?
He seems to have participated quite actively, at least for a while.
He actively participated in the discussion that he started. I would not call him a “drive-by”. However, he appears to not want to engage in the other discussions.
rhampton wrote:
Barry banned you because you did not accept quantum indeterminacy?
Most people were banned for accepting it. Has a “not” been omitted somewhere in that statement?
Upright BiPed:
petrushka:
First, Upright BiPed did not say that information is always instantiated in matter or energy. What he said was, if you want to transfer information in a material universe, information requires a material representation.
And given that the representation is not the thing being represented, it does not follow that because the transfer of information in a material universe requires a material representation that information is just the result of matter and energy alone.
So my initial questions still stand:
Information – is that one of those things that cannot be empirically detected?
Is information just the result of matter and energy alone?
My mistake. I’ll rephrase:
I too was banned from UD — in particular for rejecting, as an indisputable fact, the impossibility for a planet to both exist and not exist at the same moment.
What’s your answer to those questions Joe?
Information is an abstraction, the properties of stuff. Feel free to present a counterexample.
Give me an instance of information that is free of matter or energy.
lol. You want me to transfer information in a material universe without using a representation instantiated in matter? So you want me to prove Upright BiPed wrong. Sorry, I don’t feel like letting you all off the hook like that. 🙂
Basically, you’re agreeing with him. Do you know that?
Are abstractions nothing more than matter and energy? Are they physical? Empirically detectable? Can abstractions be reduced to matter and energy? Have you ever heard of the problem of universals?
No one here ever disagreed with UB on the claim that information is instantiated in matter or energy.
We did comment on the fact that gpuccio, among others, claims that design can be implemented by non-material entities. That would violate UB’s claim regarding transfer of information.
I’ve asked you to provide an example of information that is unencumbered by matter or energy or is not a property of matter or energy. Just provide an example.
petrushka,
I have absolutely no problem believing this, since that’s not what he said.
How so?
gpuccio obviously does not believe in a strictly material universe. His rules of information transfer do not have to follow those of Upright BiPed.
Upright BiPed, on the other hand, may be granting you your strictly material universe, if only for the sake of his argument.
I’ll say the same thing to you I said to rhampton7:
petrushka:
I can barely even make sense of your question, but I’ll try.
Information is neither matter not energy. You cannot reduce everything that exists to matter and energy. Can you even reduce all energy to matter or all matter to energy?
You said yourself that “Information is an abstraction, the properties of stuff.” A ‘property’ of a thing is not made of or composed of matter and energy.
Forget islands of function, let’s get on the same planet!
Do you deny that there is information in DNA that codes for proteins? If not, how is that information a property of the protein it codes for?
Mung wrote
I can’t resist commenting on that. For the story of that banning see here.
From that post:
(I’ll note that at that time Febble/Lizzie self-identified as a Christian theist.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!
Thanks for the link, Richard. Skipping through that PT thread from 2007 made me quite nostalgic (what for, I’m not sure) but nothing seems to have changed much except perhaps a waning number of both ID proponents and critics.
Yet she was posting at UD much more recently than that. Go figure.
And now it seems people are banned for merely disagreeing with Barry Arrington. Yeah right.
One more point about Upright BiPed and gpuccio and the concept of information transfer.
It could be that information in a material universe does not begin to exist until it is instantiated in matter.
So it could be the case that Upright BiPed is correct about information transfer within a material universe and that in the gpuccio scenario there’s no transfer of information per se from the immaterial designer to matter. The information is not transferred from the designer but rather comes into existence when it is instantiated.
That’s another scenario under which they do not contradict each other.
@ mung:
The ways of moderation at Uncommon Descent are indeed mysterious. It’s a conundrum to know how to run a blog like UD. Rest assured you’re not alone. Mike Gene, who I think you have heard of, just posted a comment at Telic Thoughts (which seems to have FAPP ceased trading), linking back to his blog “Shadowtolight.wordpress.com”.
I commented, and lo:
Alan Fox (20:40:24) : Your comment is awaiting moderation
So it’s the relative succes of book sales that really peeves you, Mike? I was checking Telic Thoughts for vital signs and saw your comment. I’m also waiting for the US atheist movement to move into the limelight!
Yet she was posting at UD much more recently than that. Go figure.
And now it seems people are banned for merely disagreeing with Barry Arrington. Yeah right.
Alan Fox –
Who’s Mike Gene?
besides a possibly-suppressive blog owner?
It’s just like magic.
I’m guessing you think ’emergence’ is just like magic. If it’s true, you can admit it. No shame.