21–30 of 72 posts
it is somewhat more likely that there is a God than that there is not [citation needed]
I hope that remains true, even with the demise of digg (and therefore, by extension, reddit).
Evolution, that's where many scientists and skeptics fail to address the big question . I can't believe that life evolves , in the sense of growing organs to meet specific needs. Natural selection does not work like that: if you have organs which don't suit you, they atrophy, that's it; if they suit you, those which have them stronger will survive. That's it. You don't grow wings to fly, lungs to breath air, brains t…
Nobody claims that a proto-bird one day woke up in a treetop, thought "oh heck, how am I going to get down?", and sprouted wings. Rather, over millions of generations of proto-birds, random variation and natural selection made winged birds more numerous and successful than wingless birds.
The point about evolutionary theory isn't that it explains everything, but that it gives us a framework to produce and evaluate explanations (for, potentially, everything). The general pattern is to imagine a series of incremental changes between generations from (say) no-wings to viable wings, where each change could occur by random genetic variation or mutation, and where in order to be selected for, each change must confer a net reproductive advantage on its generation over the previous.
From Wikipedia [1] it looks like we don't have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of flight yet (any more than we have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of True Blood), but there are several theories all of which are more plausible than waking up one day with wings.
First the existence of aliens and now the existence of God. What totally unscientific speculation is Stephen Hawking going to make next for the media to latch on to?
His PR team have already spun this as Hawking throwing down the gauntlet to religion, gleefully canvassing outrage and outright denial from Rabbis and Bishops. Wiser theologians should take a step back, bring out that age old trick, and inquire "ah... but who created gravity?"
The problem with an infinite regress is that it's, um, infinite.
It sounds like Hawking is trying to refute the claim that everything that exists must have a creator. That's the claim which allows the snooty "who created gravity" response, and also leads to the self-defeating infinite regress. Whether you believe in a creator or not, you're better off without that argument.
This is circular reasoning.
I know it's unpopular to question evolution, and this might lose me all the points I gathered in the past three weeks, but,
But this kind of argument assumes that life can and will inevitably evolve spontaneously some where, some how.
It's a tautology.
Sure, there could be a completely different form of intelligent life, in a completely different kind of environment, but that just means that God can and will create any form of life in any kind of environment.
The core question is, can life really evolve spontaneously? I'm sure many will scream "of course yes, duh".
Natural selection doesn't explain anything about how something might evolve, it just says: if you can produce many many good options, the best will survive, and therefore you get optimal design.
Sure, if there are forces that produce new ideas and things, and you can choose the best every step of the way, you'll get something really good. Like if, say, people submit patches to Linux, and they get reviewed and tested, you'll get something that Linus himself couldn't have come up with on his own.
NS is useless if there's nothing that can produce these patches. If you have a really good team of tester and code reviewers, but no one submits any patch (or, no one makes any change), then the software will not evolve on its own. It will not get better just because there are a lot of people to test it. It needs other people to make changes/submit patches.
It's the "mutation" part that tries to explain how new things actually get produced, and I find it ridiculous. Not only does it not fly with me conceptually, I'd say - at the risk of being stoned - that there's no real evidence for it. It's usually just a lot of hand waving as if, "of course mutation can produce many useful things for NS to select from, how dare you object to that?".
Yes, you can observe variations, and you can observe certain variations being selected. Like skin color, or hair type. This is, however, entirely different from observing useful patches being produced by mutations.
All cited instances of observed NS operate on variations that are already there. This is where hand waving about mutations come in.
Video games can be designed to use a high resolution or low resolution depending on the system specs. It's therefor not surprising when users on low end machines will "select" the low-resolution configuration. There are options to select from, but these options weren't produced by anything remotely resembling a mutation; it's a built-in option that's already available -- nothing new.
No one denies the design; no one, none at all. Neo-Darwinism just says that design can be automated by mutation and natural selection.
It is easy to describe how a complex system works once you discover it; but that doesn't make it any less impressive. I'm often impressed by some of my own programs, despite the fact that, not only do I know exactly how they work, but I even built them myself. Usually when you discover the internals of a system, it gets even more impressive.
So the reason there is a God, is that there must be a reason everything is created. I have tried to find out why that must be so, but have not come up with it. The only reason I could think of why people are saying this is that it might feel better for us humans that there is a reason.
Causality is such a fundamental concept that it is nearly impossible to consider a universe without a cause. Consequently, some funky research has been done on it in physics, but I haven't read any of it.
> any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it. This is circular reasoning. I know it's unpopular to question evolution, and this might lose me all the points I gathered in the past three weeks, but, But this kind of argument assumes that life can and will inevitably evolve spontaneously some where, some how. It's a tautology. Sure, there could be…
> any form of intelligent life that evolves anywhere will automatically find that it lives somewhere suitable for it. This is circular reasoning. I know it's unpopular to question evolution, and this might lose me all the points I gathered in the past three weeks, but, But this kind of argument assumes that life can and will inevitably evolve spontaneously some where, some how. It's a tautology. Sure, there could be…
You're suggesting that there exists an intelligent designer, someone or something that created 'options', as you put it, which then go through the process of natural selection. I, on the other hand, propose that there was no intelligent design, that all the 'options' were created simply through the workings of the laws of nature. Now, somebody might say - but who, then, created these laws, who said that they're going…
The design is obvious. It doesn't need any proof. No one even denies it. Even the most hard-core atheists I've come across use the word "design" a lot when talking about the human body or even any biological structure.
They just propose that it can be automated in such a simple way that even the deaf and blind nature can do it. I'm pointing out a fatal flaw in a key element of this supposed automatic mechanism.
"We'll find another way" is not really a good answer; not a very scientific one, anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His PR team have already spun this as Hawking throwing down the gauntlet to religion, gleefully canvassing outrage and outright denial from Rabbis and Bishops. Wiser theologians should take a step back, bring out that age old trick, and inquire "ah... but who created gravity?"
And who created the creator? The problem with an infinite regress is that it's, um, infinite. It sounds like Hawking is trying to refute the claim that everything that exists must have a creator. That's the claim which allows the snooty "who created gravity" response, and also leads to the self-defeating infinite regress. Whether you believe in a creator or not, you're better off without that argument.
it is somewhat more likely that there is a God than that there is not [citation needed]
I agree with your point, but this isn't really how you do commenting on HN. I hope that remains true, even with the demise of digg (and therefore, by extension, reddit).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His PR team have already spun this as Hawking throwing down the gauntlet to religion, gleefully canvassing outrage and outright denial from Rabbis and Bishops. Wiser theologians should take a step back, bring out that age old trick, and inquire "ah... but who created gravity?"
And who created the creator? The problem with an infinite regress is that it's, um, infinite. It sounds like Hawking is trying to refute the claim that everything that exists must have a creator. That's the claim which allows the snooty "who created gravity" response, and also leads to the self-defeating infinite regress. Whether you believe in a creator or not, you're better off without that argument.