Posted on 11/17/2003 6:02:20 AM PST by Tribune7
The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.
The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.
In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.
The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions – and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.
In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.
Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
That’s Right Wing Professor’s link, not mine. I may try and look at that rebuttal when I have time, but I’m not going to reboot a very narrow debate with Alamo-girl that you’ve taken interest in on that much broader basis until that one is resolved.
I suspect the same, Alamo-Girl. The evolution of human consciousness began radically to change with the Incarnation, as Christ's message of love and hope was spread throughout the world. Or so it seems to me.
jennyp, after the Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan, for some strange reason I thought that women throughout that country would throw off their burkahs, like liberated slaves would throw off their chains. This, of course, did not happen. Afghan women kept their burkahs. After hearing about what happened to that little Palestinian girl, I now understand why. The more beautiful the woman, the greater the incentive to keep covered up.
Great post, jennyp.
I like this expression for the fallacy. It has been termed the inverse gambler's fallacy (pdf file.)
Indeed, perhaps the expense of declaring someone an "other" under the globalism of the Clinton administration had something to do with the shift to aggressive tolerance. The thought makes me sad because treating "outsiders" as neighbors pretentiously to make money off them is much too brittle a motive to withstand the inevitable strains on relationships.
Your link doesn't work for me, but I searched on the phrase to see what it was all about. It's very close to the fallacy I'm talking about. But I don't think it's exactly the same thing. It's about seeing a double-six roll of the dice and assuming that there must have been many previous rolls in order for such an "improbable" combo to appear. "My" fallacy, on the other hand, results in a conclusion that the improbable result was guided, or intended, even if it's only a single roll of the dice.
Still, I'd never heard of the inverse gambler's fallacy before, and I appreciate the info. A friend of mine who teaches philosophy says it's not all that unusual for a "new" fallacy to observed and named, and he likes "my" fallacy. He agrees that applying a name to a fallacy makes it easier to spot it, and to criticize it.
Would you kindly show me where I have used Yockey references to attack evolution?!
The reference was not to anything you wrote, but to recent posts by betty boop, notably this one .
Furthermore, Yockey’s work dovetails quite nicely into the research on autonomous biological self-organizing complexity. The indication is that the evolutionary process is not happenstance, that evolution is not a directionless walk after all.
There is no such indication.
In page 313 in Yockey’s book he says ”"...The Shannon entropy and the Maxwell-Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy... have nothing to do with each other".
You can repost this as often as you want; it's still wrong. The Shannon entropy is simply the combinatorial entropy of a sequence; it forms part of the total entropy. The remaining part of the total entropy is the entropy of a randomly sequenced piece of DNA of the same base composition as the defined sequence.
As for the position of Information theory in the biological sciences; this appears to be a reasonable evaluation.
Gee thanks. I'm so relieved. My research can now proceed.
The whole point of quantum field theory is that even fields must be described as being composed of discrete particles. Every type of particle defines a field; every field is composed of particles. Particles and fields are simply different aspects of one indivisible monad.
The only difference between the types of particle/fields* that we call "forces" and those we call "matter" is angular momentum. The force particles/fields have angular momenta measured in integer units of h-bar, while the matter particle/fields have angular momenta measured in half-odd-integer units of h-bar. That's all.
* No convenient portmanteau presents itself, save the unfortunate "pields" and "farticles".
admiratio: admiration, wonder
retrospecio, retrospecere: to look back
retrospecatum: my guess at the participial form
My best guess at how it should look, assuming the ablative case follows in: Admiratio in retrospectato
For the record, to sum up the Yockey dispute which has gone so awry on this thread, following is a brief summary...
Yockey, Rocha and such do not dispute whether a chemical catalyst environment ever existed.
And, IMHO, if the universe did not have a beginning there would be no point in examining the probability of abiogenesis because in the face of infinity the plenitude argument prevails, i.e. anything that can happen, will. But there was not infinite opportunity. The universe had a beginning, so did this planet and so did life on this planet.
So the questions asked by Yockey, Rocha, Pattee, von Neumann, Pearson, etc. begin with what is life (which is neither addressed by the theory of evolution nor biology) - what is the information content of organisms, how could that information content have arisen and become organized into the functional biological systems we observe today.
Yockey used Shannon entropy to examine the information content of a small protein, cytochrome c and concluded that even it could not have arisen by happenstance; and the minimum information content of a simplest organism is much larger than the information content of cytochrome c.
Rocha says not so fast (figuratively) --- perhaps the information content arose from a toggling back and forth, in the RNA world, between a state which is stable to carry information, and not to be reactive – back and forth, to bootstrap an initial information content required for self-organizing complexity.
The oldest arguments of the Talk Origin posters concern themselves with the chemical environment – they are not talking about the information content. Thus, they are not “on the same page” with Yockey, Rocha, Pattee, von Neumann, etc.
The more recent arguments of the non-mathematics and information theory critics equate Shannon entropy (which is the uncertainty of communications) with the second law of thermodynamics. But Yockey among many others (who of course do not dispute the second law of thermodynamics) --- insist that Shannon entropy is not the same thing at all. This is discussed at length in his 1992 book. The reasons they are not the same are summarized:
Another, which has been discussed here by Freeper tortoise, who is an Artificial Intelligence expert, essentially asserts that Kolmogorov complexity/Solomonof induction is a better method to analyze the information content.
Nevertheless, as I recall, even tortoise would agree with Yockey on this point [quoting Yockey:] … “This self-catalytic molecule must have a very small information content. By that token, there must be very few of them [Section 2.4.1]” IOW, even if one assumes a self-catalytic molecule and the state toggling of Rocha and the alternative complexity model - the opportunity is finite.
Some interesting quotes from the key people in the information theory approach to abiogenesis:
"By axiomatizing automata in this manner one has thrown half the problem out the window, and it may be the more important half. One has resigned oneself not to explain how these parts are made up of real things, specifically, how these parts are made up of actual elementary particles, or even of higher chemical molecules. One does not ask the most intriguing, exciting, and important question of why the molecules or aggregates which in nature really occur in these parts are the sort of things they are, why they are essentially very large molecules in some cases but large aggregates in other cases, why they always lie in a range beginning at a few microns and ending at a few decimeter. This is a very peculiar range for an elementary object, since it is, even on a linear scale, at least five powers of ten away from the sizes of really elementary entities." – John von Neumann, theory of self-replication.
“What exactly does our view of universal dynamical laws abstract away from life, so that the striking distinctions between the living and the lifeless become obscure and apparently paradoxical?” – H.H. Pattee
“My second answer is that if you abstract away the details of how subject and object interact, the "very peculiar range" of sizes and behaviors of the allosteric polymers that connect subject and object, the memory controlled construction of polypeptides, the folding into highly specific enzymes and other functional macromolecules, the many-to-many map of sequences to structures, the self-assembly, and the many conformation dependent controls - in other words, if you ignore the actual physics involved in these molecules that bridge the epistemic cut, then it seems unlikely that you will ever be able to distinguish living organisms by the dynamic laws of "inorganic corpuscles" or from any number of coarse-grained artificial simulations and simulacra of life. Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living matter, not by some modification of physics, some intricate nonlinear dynamics, or some universal laws of complexity, but by local and unique heteropolymer constraints that exhibit detailed behavior unlike the behavior of any other known forms of matter in the universe?” – H.H. Pattee
RWP, I'm terribly sorry for the tone of my post at 810. And I thank you for the link at 813. It is one I've researched once before, in particular Schneider's view and his review of Yockey's book which is followed on that message board by Yockey's reply. It is all quite informative!
The distinction between particles and fields under ambient conditions is generally a meaningful one; and particles can be regarded as discrete entities, without worrying about creation and annihilation operators. If you have one mole of helium at standard temperature and pressure, the number of helium atoms in the mole does not fluctuate on any energy/time scale meaningful to chemistry or biology.
The original discussion was about whether the limitations QED places on the idea of discrete particles has any bearing on the physics of living systems. I maintain that it does not (except in the respect that it affects the values of fundamental constants and interactions).
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