Posted on 04/21/2016 12:30:08 PM PDT by Heartlander
I’ve voiced no dogma. Worthwhile conversations require both side to read carefully. Please start.
Quoting Darwin is of little value. He was a great thinker and discovered some great truths but he knows no more about modern evolutionary science than Columbus did about North American geography.
Really? You started by completely misreading the posted article with a dogmatic question and yet I still continued the conversation.
I’m sorry but so what? The fact that the Founders paid lip service to bronze-age mythology is simply good politics. Jefferson certainly was no christian and the same is true for Franklin.
You asked me about the possible sources of consciousness which I answered. Again, careful reading is really a valuable life skill, look into it.
Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will…. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.
Again - take your own advice...
You should expect years from now people will be saying the same about you and your beliefs - since you believe they ultimately come from mindlessness. In fact, you should expect to be wrong about most everything due to there being no reason for truth according to your belief.
Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
-Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology), p. 5
So you’re saying it would be be like a hundred agitated monkeys typing War and Peace as opposed to just screaming and running around.
1. Functional InformationHow could such a system form randomly without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
2.Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate?
Furthermore, DNA contains multi-layered information that reads both forward and backwards - DNA stores data more efficiently than anything we've created - and a majority of DNA contains metainformation (information about how to use the information in the context of the related data).
You answered nothing...
and what support is there for your beliefs beyond bronze age mythology? You seem to be unable to imaging anything more advanced that the mind. I can easily imagine a creative force lacking consciousness, will or purpose.
Why are any of those three necessary for your vision of a creative force? Gravity has none of those. Electromagnetism has none of those. They have formed galaxies.
You burden yourself with lots of unexamined premises, it seems to me.
well, how about that? It seems like an attempt to use the verifiable basis of Darwin’s work you support the discredited work of others.
Why don’t you tackle ERV’s and explain how the irrefutable evidence they provide that humans and chimps had a common ancestor isn’t so?
I’ll accept a creative force but that doesn’t require consciousness, will or purpose.
you ask me to explain how things like DNA could exist without a bronze age myth to explain them. I ask you to explain the origins of a complexity like your myth a d you say your myth needs no source and fault me for not answering your question.
Really? If the rules of logic form the basis for your assertion that complexity needs a designer, you need to explain the origins of your creator and bronze age crap like myths and Aristotle won’t do. intellectual rigor requires consistency. Who designed your designer?
False logic in this question. it presumes the conditions created by the designer are the same as for the creator. Thats akin to saying that the conditions inside a petri dish apply to the experimenter outside the dish. Using secular concepts, Prior to the Big Bang Matter, energy and time as we perceive it did not exist. The Creator arguably is of that environment whatever it is. Thus the concept of origin would be very different then what we here in the petri dish can perceive.
it’s like this. Your entire logical basis is the silly notion the high complexity requires a designer. If you assert this, then it logically follows that the very high complexity of the designer requires a more complex designer. That is logically inescapable unless you simply want to dodge the issue by resorting to some miracle. It matters not a whit what initial conditions might have been since the logic still applies. You can’t talk your way out of this corner you’ve painted yourself into.
That’s mythology, not logic but I’ve come to expect no more in this discussion.
The argument your tried was a logical fallacy as it bootstrapped the limitations we have within a known created universe to what was before. Obviously before matter and energy TIME with its attendant cause and effect could not exist. E = Mc^2 is what we know. Before the Big Bang we did not have any of them so no C aka Linear time a function of energy and matter which came about from Nothing we can fathom.
So your logic as you call it is faulty as it akin to the bacteria in a Petri dish ascribing to world outside the dish the limitations inside the dish. That is not logical.
So no its not corner at all, its you lack of ability to to reason.
You tell me, on what basis of knowledge should there be presumed linear time with its attendant cause and effect as we know it before there was matter and energy?
… the naturalist believes that beneath every natural phenomenon there exists yet another natural phenomenon. If explanation by reference to an endless stack of large turtles is silly, then an explanation by reference to an endless stack of natural phenomena would be equally so. The naturalist's answer for the origin of life, therefore, is some natural phenomenon. (Which one is not particularly relevant.) When you ask them how that natural phenomenon came to be, their response boils down to: "It's natural phenomena all the way down!"…And beyond the design in DNA, we have a fine-tuned universe, a rare Earth, human consciousness, etc… Yet you believe your brain ultimately comes from mindlessness.
-Pete Chadwell
“If you do not assume the law of non-contradiction, you have nothing to argue about. If you do not assume the principles of sound reason, you have nothing to argue with. If you do not assume libertarian free will, you have no one to argue against. If you do not assume morality to be an objective commodity, you have no reason to argue in the first place. If you do not assume mind is primary, there is no “you” to make any argument at all.”
- William J Murray
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