1 Cor 1:
26Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29so that no one may boast before him. 30It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.
This guy says that his analogy of the 100 switches has 2100 possible combinations. I get something just short of 1.27E30. Am I wrong or is he?
Am I missing something here. Didn't Darwin put forward the idea in the "Origin of Species" that natural selection creates change in species? Why are the Creationists getting their britches tied in knots over this idea. He is not arguing the beginning of life, he is talking about change over time. Creation and evolution are two very different but not necessarily exclusive notions.
...If you push Dawkins and company far enough, you find yourself more or less where Aristotle was more than 2,000 years ago in stating his view that any chain of cause-and-effect must ultimately begin with an Uncaused Cause.
Alright, who is Dawkins?
If nothing else, this article explained the concept of algorithms to me for the first time. I’ve heard the word all my life — well, at least since computers boomed into ubiquitousness in the 80s — but could never adequately explain what an algorithms is. Now I can.
Just a different timescale - what then again, you’ve got to figure its for a preliterate bunch of herders to develop the concept of billions - when the zero hadn’t been invented yet.
Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The achievements of religion in past history -- bloody crusades, torturing inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying missionaries, legally enforced resistance to each new piece of scientific truth until the last possible moment -- are even more impressive. And what has it all been in aid of?
I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the answer is absolutely nothing at all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
I haven't seen the part where Dawkins says evolution disproves that God exists. Dawkins would believe God doesn't exist even if there were no biological sciences.
Of course he skipped over the achievements of the atheists. You know, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot,...
This sounds like something one of you recently posted.
Unconditioned potentiality?
Don't start nothin' won't be nothin.'
2<sup><font size=2>100</font></sup>
2100
Scientific atheists, who were mainly biologists, hijacked evolutionary theory to destroy the ramparts of religion and defeat its theologists. The theologists turned to the physicists and mathematicians and exposed the feet of clay that the proponents of this new atheism were standing on. It seems we have come full circle.
Have to work in the morning.
Cheers!
I am as wary of atheists proving their religion with evolution as ID/Creationists making believe they are scientific. (The former give fuel to the latter.) So I find this refreshing:
Accepting evolution, therefore, requires neither the denial of a Creator nor the loss of the idea of ultimate purpose. It resolves neither issue for us one way or the other.
But evolution has been empirically associated with materialism for a reason: It undermines some traditional religious notions. Contemplating a Creator who acts through a process as multi-layered as evolution tends to lead us to see the spiritual world in an increasingly abstract light. The risk to religion is that this accommodation can begin an inexorable process that leads to a theology so attenuated that it becomes vanishingly close to materialism.
Fortunately, it is possible to thread the intellectual needle: to defer to scientific explanations for non-ultimate physical processes, while still remaining within the central Judeo-Christian tradition.
It's the author who's stuck in BC thinking. Here are two other possibilities.
Trace backward the cause-effect chain of a dynamical system that's "chaotic" and eventually the "causes" diffuse away into nothingness. It's often called the "butterfly effect" and folks explain it as a butterfly wing's flapping in China causing a hurricane in the South Atlantic. But of course that's nonsense, it was really a man sneezing back in '52 that caused it.
Or maybe another way of looking at it is it's caused by many uncaused causeS. All those backward causal chains terminate in quantum events that "just happened," uncaused, for no particular reason.
No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins must always...remain a non-scientific question.
Again limited thinking. What if the origin of the universe is actually in the future? It's generally agreed that GR does not rule out time-like loops in spacetime. Maybe, for example, future humans become so adept at curving and shaping spacetime that they can connect a future point in spacetime to the origin of the universe. Or maybe we find that the universe is actually cyclic and observe the end which is actually the beginning again.
His claim that GAs work on the roughly the same principle is the high-low guessing game is completely wrong. He also says that GAs sort through the vast "search space" of possibilities--and thus home in quickly on the best one but convergence depends on the shape of the fitness function and can be very slow indeed. Intuitively it seems to me that for some fitness functions there'll be a finite probability that the optimum won't be acheived by the algorithm he describes.
Later in trying to refute the randomness of evolution he says if a specific mutation is caused by radiation hitting a nucleotide, both the radiation and its effect on the nucleotide are governed by normal physical laws but of course these are quantum laws which describe only probabilities of interactions - if the probability is not one, the event is still random.
He also says it is prohibitively difficult to calculate the result of this process--but it is, in principle, calculable; the fitness landscape, after all, is only the product of the interaction of other physical processes but it's not at all clear what it would mean for this to be "in principle calculable" if, for example, the calculation would require more than the computational resourses available in the entire universe and I consider that very likely.