Kantian Naturalist: You simply have not provided any account of truth, reason, and logic. Until you do, there is no reason for me to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has anything at all to do with God.
Some initial first thoughts.
What would it mean to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic? Don’t all of us take all three of these for granted?
Can science settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about the question?
If science cannot settle the question of what would it take to provide an account of truth, reason, and logic, what does that tell us about science?
Who were the first scientists to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Who were the first philosophers to ask and attempt to answer these questions and what answers did they offer?
Is the argument that because someone has not provided an account of truth, reason, and logic there is therefore no reason to believe that a correct understanding of these concepts has nothing at all to do with God a non-sequitur?
What is true. What is logical. What is reasonable. Are these not all inter-twined? Which of these can we dispense with while retaining the others?
Pretty much like non atheists, some are ,some aren’t
And some start out gracious but become less so when the damn pig won’t stop trying to sing.
I have no idea what this means. It was falsifiable then, but not now?
So do you agree that even rabbits in the Cambrian wouldn’t falsify evolution, because you could always just say that just needs an explanation that we are still looking for? Just like your side is now doing with epigenetics?
Rabbits in the precambrian would falsify the standard phylogenetic tree and massively screw over our understanding of the history of life.
It still wouldn’t falsify the fact that evolution happens, or the close relationships between man and chimp (for example).
Evolutionary theory has many sub-branches, a falsification of one aspect does not necessarily carry over into another. You could, for example, falsify universal common descent, yet all the inferences drawn from the LTEE would still be true.
I don’t think it is possible, with one single observation or experiment, to prove ALL of evolutonary thought false. You’d have to do several for many different subcategories.
Well, unless you could somehow show that all organisms actually don’t reproduce or that there is no such thing as imperfect inheritance of characteristics. Or allele frequencies never change. Which I don’t think is practically possible.
Indeed. Strictly, unambiguous evidence of lagomorphs appearing suddenly in the Cambrian period would refute common descent for lagomorphs, not other orders or species. But if one order was shown to have completely separate origins from all other terrestrial life-forms… There are many fundamental common features across terrestrial living organisms: based on carbon, chemistry in aqueous mediums, almost universal DNA code, RNA and protein as catalysts. Find some life-form not possessing some of these features would strongly suggest separate origin.
What might be an effective approach (if someone wanted to supplant evolutionary theory) would be to come up with an alternative explanation or hypothesis that fits the observed facts better than evolutionary theory does. Even if we were to find evidence of terrestrial (or perhaps extra-terrestrial) life having originated independently from life descended from the LUCA, it would still likely be subject to the same constraints of environment, resources and competition.
phoodoo,
There is nothing in epigenetics that poses any problem for evolutionary theory. Much though you might get the opposite impression from the way Creationists sites are humping it for all they are worth.
OK
To rephrase yet again for the sake of appeasing the nitpickers
When comparing the very special case of unjustifed true opinions and knowledge the distinguishing factor is knowledge of the truth instead of truth alone.
happy now?
peace
ps what exactly does this have to do with the topic at hand again?
Whether I’m happy or not is another question (one daughter just headed on a X-country trip and the other is off to her first day of school–so bleh), but what you’ve written above isn’t right either.
I don’t know what “the point” may be. I’m just telling you for whatever it may be worth (maybe nothing!), that some of the stuff you’re posting here is wrong. You can fix it or not as you please, but please stop insisting what you’ve put is right when it clearly isn’t.
You may call it nitpicking, but presumably, you don’t want to be depending on stuff for premises in your arguments that are obviously false. You could be ending up with “God” because of a pile of confusions. That would be bad, no?
walto,
Or, you could just ask FMM read the Meno so that he understands that we have a whole tradition based on the idea that justification is independent of truth. One can have good reasons for one’s beliefs and yet those beliefs might be false — or one might have true beliefs by accident or “intuition”.
I’m divided on the question whether we need truth as an independent constraint on knowledge. Presumably, if our theory of truth is deflationary, then truth can’t be an independent epistemic constraint on belief — in deflationary terms, “p is true” just means “p”.
Does that count against deflationary treatments? Or does it tell us that deflationism, for all its merits, can’t be the whole story about truth? Or does it show us that truth just isn’t an epistemic concept at all, but only a semantic one — in which case knowledge isn’t justified true belief but only justified belief?
This I get
I do appreciate any correction you may offer. Comprehensiveness is important.
I suppose I am too focused on the discussion at hand at times. For that I apologize
peace
Really Allan? That’s a pretty specious hand-wave (I find that tends to be your standard go to line these days-“its not a problem, what makes you think it couldn’t happen?”) .
Who in their right mind thinks random mutations could create a system of genes, which then tell other genes what to become ? How complicated exactly does a system have to become before you might finally admit that, perhaps this is a system which requires too many things happening at once to be put together piecemeal?
Do you think ANY evolutionist has ever come up with a plausible scenario for a step by step-mutation, then selection, way to get a switchboard which tells genes what to do and when? You think evolution theory predicted something like this?
Even one wrong command, and the entire organism is toast from the beginning.
You are becoming the hand-waving specialist here Allan. How to hand-wave away this? You don’t think about? Its not a problem? We have know about this problem for years? What makes you think it can’t?….Any other strategies for denial?
Rumraket,
As Allan has shown, NOTHING is too big of a problem for those who really need to believe evolution. What could we possibly discover that hard core materialists would say, hm, that doesn’t sound possible from random mutations?
There doesn’t seem to be anything.
That is an interesting topic.
Can one really have “good” reasons for believing a lie?
I don’t believe in accident and intuition can be justification. If it is reliable and accurate
peace
It’s not good form to assume that others are not familiar with the topics at hand. I’m sure that I don’t have the expertise of some but that does not mean that I’m ignorant.
peace
Yet we still find homology between yeast’s genes and every vertebrate out there, suggesting unmistakably that they all share a common ancestor. And the more closely related those vertebrates are, the higher the DNA homology. What are the odds? What are the odds of finding fossils of precursors of these vertebrates and that the dating of them is consistent with the phylogenetic tree?
And your position requires that vertebrates were poofed into existence. Now let’s compare the evidence that you have for that with the evidence that vertebrates share a common ancestor with yeast, and lancelets, and tunicates… and everything else
Decided to take a break for the long weekend. Sorry for the delay in response KN.
Yes. I understand that’s their question. I’ve asked a counter question a few times that has thus far gone unanswered however: why should I can whether I know I can trust my senses. In point of fact, that strikes me as a contradiction of concepts: one generally establishes trust in spite of the fact of never being able to know with any certainty. That’s what trust is.
So I trust my senses because thus far they seem to have provided amazingly reliable correspondence. Do I know they will continue to do so? No. Do I care? No. Do I trust they will. Yes. Done.
Quite so.
A MUCH better description of my perspective. Really well put! Thanks KN!
No prob.
I just wanted to mention, in response to phoodoo’s remarks about theory alteration that it’s a general fact about ALL scientific theories that an epicycle can usually be added here or there if there is sufficient reason for (or interest in) keeping a dominant theory kicking. That’s just the nature of theorizing in the presence of new data.
But when a theory gets so swamped with ad hoc amendments that it’s little more than a Rube Goldberg thingy, it will usually collapse and be replaced by something at least as fundamental (having as much explanatory power) but more elegant. So there’s nothing special about evolutionary theory in that regard, and it’s hardly a forceful criticism.
This is all in Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, etc. You really need a preferable substitute if you want something with so much utility to be dumped.
Hahaha…you actually wrote this line. And it never occurred to you how absurd it was?
Maybe someone will point out to you why its so absurd. I doubt it will be a fellow evolutionist.
It seems trivially obvious that deflationism is not the whole story about truth. But while that is trivially obvious, I don’t think your example contributes much.
It always seemed to me that knowledge and belief are very different things.
No you don’t.
walto,
You are claiming that all theories are as unfalsifiable as evolution?
And the only way to discredit a theory is if you have a replacement?
We can’t discredit string theory until we have a replacement?
phoodoo,
It’s the best explanation we have right now.
This is part of why I consider theories to be neither true nor false. We tend to be mostly concerned with goodness of fit, when it comes to our scientific theories. So making a small change to improve goodness of fit is usually welcome.
Something that is false is not necessarily a lie.
It usually takes more than some random occurrence to blow up a long-standing fecund theory. I mean, do you think the theory of gravity would be falsified by somebody walking on water?
Walto is right, and you are wrong.
I’m not sure if walto is claiming that. For myself, I never saw falsificationism as providing useful criteria. Theories aren’t really true or false, so falsificationism doesn’t fit.
The only way to replace a theory is to have a replacement. A useful theory will continue to be used until something better comes along.
String Theory isn’t an actual scientific theory. It is a speculative hypothesis.
Right. One might have many good reasons for believing something that’s false. Heard it on TV, saw it in the newspaper, heard it from a trusted friend, etc. Could still be false. And it may not be that anybody was lying. The reporter could have made a mistake, or her transmission might have been garbled, etc.
This whole reply is not even sensible enough to be wrong.
“Walto is right, and I am not sure what he is claiming.”
“String theory isn’t a theory.”
” A useful theory will continue to be used until something better comes along.”
“Theories aren’t really true or false, so falsificationism doesn’t fit.”
That is just one poor statement after another Neil. Not even good enough to be wrong I am afraid.
It’s observably true. Demonstrably true
You’re an ape, and a fish, deal with it
phoodoo,
Well, what DOES make you think it’s a problem? ‘It’s rilly complex’ is not an argument. Why should I be anything other than dismissive of the latest Creationist Big Deal, when I don’t see it as a big deal at all, and you’ve done nothing with it other than read it on some Creationist site and then regurgitate the word and some blether about complexity? We know biology’s complex.
Basically, it is no more difficult for a gene product to bind and influence the production of another gene product than it is for a gene product to bind a substrate and catalyse its reaction. So, no surprise that people who think evolution plausible are not remotely fazed by epigenetics, even in the face of foaming-at-the-mouth ranters who say they should be.
There’s a big difference between “wrong” and “incomplete”.
Yes, unless somehow you could show that only evolutionary processes occurred, obviously any number of other processes could also have happened. Design, for one thing. Aliens came along and threw some rabbits (animals morphologically similar to rabbits, at least) into the mix. They’d probably die in the Cambrian (what would they eat. anyway?), but clearly something other than evolution is always possible.
Otherwise it would be like IDists/creationists say, that “design” and other processes are simply ruled out a priori. However, not having seen other instances of aliens or gods putting organisms unrelated to everything else on earth, we’d first doubt that the rabbits really existed during the Cambrian (well, what would they eat? How would they have evolved?), and try to find out how more recent fossils were incorporated into older sedimentary rocks, or whatever. If that failed, well, one rabbit might end up just being an outlier. We don’t know why it was found there, but everything else fits the normal evolutionary scenario, so we’re not changing our theories (or concluding alien intervention) all because of one uncertain fossil. A bunch of rabbit fossils, many from widely separated regions, would certainly beg for hypotheses to account for them, yet if rabbits are the only mammals in the Cambrian, there might be no resolution of the question. Find some chunks of titanium dioxide and aluminum oxide in the shapes of spacecraft bits associated with the rabbit fossils, and you might suspect aliens.
Evolution needn’t be the only game in town, after all. But we’d need the evidence to suppose that something else occurred in addition to evolution, let alone that evolution did not occur, rather that a whole lot of design instances are responsible for life’s forms. That lacks any meaningful evidence, while any chance of a bit of alien/supernatural intervention cannot actually be ruled out.
Glen Davidson
I’m guessing you are claiming circularity that “closely related species are closely related”. The point is that [the phylogeny of]* relationships inferred from shared characteristics (evidence from taxonomy) is confirmed by the consilient evidence from comparing DNA sequences.
*ETA clarity
Except for all the times when the closeness is not confirmed by comparing the DNA? Then what Alan?
Oh well?
Is it ever disconfirmed, Phoodoo?
dazz,
There is certainly evidence that supports common descent as the paper you sent me points out. The challenge is the massive innovations that need to occur from yeast forward and the complex sequences that need to be generated to support those innovations. The amount of intermediates is immaterial. Not having a defined mechanism is problematic for UCD. If the cell can generate its own sequences as James Shapiro hypothesizes then the problem is solved.
All those times? What are you referring to? Have you an example or two?
colewd,
And these are? And evolution cannot produce them because?
phoodoo,
Interesting: If you protect your theory with the “God of the gaps” defense you are effectively making the theory unfalsifiable.
Certainly not when you remove what he was replying to
Is TSZ now a Creationist site?
I’ll just park this here:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/geohist.html
next to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species
What model are you using to calculate your probabilities?
I agree.
Alan Fox,
You are unaware of the many instances in biology where the molecular phylogeny differs from the morphological?
You mean I have to start at the very beginning of biology lessons Alan?
That’s confounding.
Fact is, the evidence for common descent is there, and it’s undeniable, regardless of what “innovations” were produced in the process. Regardless of the “challenges” you want to imagine.
Regardless of mechanisms: how many times do we need to tell you that the absence of a mechanism would not be problematic for UCD? and that the mechanisms are actually known?
You can keep repeating all that to yourself as much as you need to suppress reality, but reality won’t go away
Mung,
You agree that we have to accept theories, however poor and inadequate they are for explaining phenomenon, simply because we have no alternative explanation? Why?
Like if we have evidence that someone might have murdered someone, by the evidence is really flimsy, in fact downright fabricated, we still have to assume they were the murderer, until we have a better suspect? The suspect can’t just be unknown?
phoodoo,
Just list 10 of the “many” and we’ll go through them.
Indeed I am. Please enlighten me.
I wouldn’t have thought molecular phylogeny crops up right at the beginning of biology lessons. Just give me an example or two.
Excellent work, phoodoo. You are a demonstrated master at quote mining.