Fratricide: New Atheists vs. Framing Atheists (it's getting ugly out there!)

Evolution News & Views ^ | Michael Egnor, M.D.

[GodGunsGuts]

Fratricide: New Atheists vs. Framing Atheists

As of late there has been a lot of spittle passed between two camps in the Darwin-sphere. Things are getting really nasty, as so often happens among atheist factions.

On one side are the new atheists: Coyne, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Myers.

On the other side are the … well for want of a better word — the "framing" atheists: Ruse, Mooney, Kirshenbaum, Nisbet, Scott.

With the exception of a few theist Darwinians (an oxymoron, I know) like Ken Miller, the motivation of the combatants seems to be the same: how to best advance an atheist-Darwinian understanding of man and nature. The factions differ on tactics.

The new atheists advocate...

[GodGunsGuts]

Ping!

[domenad]

A group of idiots fighting over what the don’t believe in. Atheism is now officially a religion.

[sr4402]

A former KGB office said that once the government fell, the socialists would be killed. This because they get disillusioned with the results and start speaking out which is intolerable to communism.

This is why the press has to be taken over, so if any socialists escape to complain, they can't get any traction to inflame the population against the socialism they preached.

Atheists - this is what you have to look forward to.

[GodGunsGuts]

That’s why I refer to them as the Temple of Darwin :o)

[GodGunsGuts]

Very true. Lenin wrote a little book entitled “Left Wing Communism: An Infintile Disorder,” in which Lenin argued that idealistic communists should be constantly purged from the party (and all that that implies) to make room for communists who are willing to blindly follow orders. If the communist elite want go right, the party faithful must follow. If the communist elite want to form a pact with Hitler, the party faithful must tow the line...or else!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Raymann]

Read the article, do you see any conflict between these “two” groups?

This is a made-up fight between two, not too dissimilar branches of though. I doubt very much most atheist would categorize them as belonging to either of the two groups (I certainty don’t).

BTW: what officially makes it a religion exactly?

[GourmetDan]

"1) The scientific method is the proper tool for acquiring all knowledge. (Which is self-contradictory, because this positivist assertion is itself a philosophical, not a scientific, inference.)"

Whoops...

[Liberty1970]

There are actually a number of denominations of atheism (same as any other religion); dominant ones include the secular humanists and marxists. Buddhists are also atheists technically, and so that would be a third major branch of atheism.

David Noebel has some excellent books comparing worldviews (Understanding the Times, for example) that outlines and discusses the various major world religions, including Secular Humanism and Marxism. I think some of his more recent works also include Buddhism, or perhaps that is covered under New Age (or would that be another major branch of atheism?)

[whattajoke]

BTW: what officially makes it a religion exactly?

Apparently infighting is a good start. Heck, Christians and Muslims have been doing it for a couple thousand years. Heck, they even kill each other over incredibly minor differences from time to time.

[Lucky Dog]

BTW: what officially makes it a religion exactly?

I think, therefore I am --- Descartes Cogito ergo sum

Worded otherwise: Because I think, I exist in time and space.

Logically, everything that exists in time and space had an a priori cause.

Time and space have not always existed. (Re: Big Bang Theory, etc.)

There is no, non-faith-based, scientifically falsifiable explanation for the beginning of time and space, i.e., existence.

Therefore, time and space had a cause that exists outside of time and space, for example, an eternal Deity.

The theory of evolution cannot not even definitively explain the beginning of life, much less, the beginning of existence. Furthermore, its primary postulates: random mutation and survival of the fittest cannot adequately account for readily observable, apparent contradictions: entropy, kingdom transition, i.e., “progressing” from one to another (Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea, Bacteria) in conjunction with the laws of probability among a number of other discontinuities.

Therefore, the theory of evolution as an explanation of reality must be held as incomplete and/or inaccurate. Such an assessment is, perhaps, even, more true of evolution than it was of Newtonian physics with the arrival of the Theory of Relativity. To insist that evolution is anything else requires its acceptance upon faith.

A requirement to accept any explanation of reality on faith defines that explanation as a religion, not a scientific theory.

[Raymann]

@Liberty1970

Doesn’t really answer my question? Stating that something is so doesn’t make it true.

@whattajoke

Infighting? There’s infighting in my fantasy baseball league, that makes us a religion?

@Lucky Dog

An answer at last!

I agree with you that time and space didn’t exist before the big bang, unless of course it was proceeded by another universe undergoing it’s Big Crunch but for a “time”, time and space didn’t exist.

You said, “Therefore, time and space had a cause that exists outside of time and space, for example, an eternal Deity.”

Or chance, or (like I mentioned earlier) the reverberation from a previous crunch. It would even be that there was no cause, at those densities a few nanoseconds after the big bang physics breaks down, who know about causality?

The point is, we don’t know...none of us do. You won’t figure out if there is a god from physics.

“Therefore, the theory of evolution as an explanation of reality must be held as incomplete and/or inaccurate.”

I disagree and I can refute what you said earlier but lets go ahead and say you’re right. Does a disapproval of evolution somehow make other theories more credible? I can prove 1+1 doesn’t equal 3 but that doesn’t make 4 a better answer either.

“A requirement to accept any explanation of reality on faith defines that explanation as a religion”

In general, I agree. Personally I would call such a person spiritual, the term religion has strong connotations of a good deal of organization.

Take evolution in this light though. Most reputable biologists have taken a certain set of facts they know about the natural world, combined it with their knowledge of natural selection and came up with this theory (abit incomplete) of evolution. The parts they don’t know are filled in with what they see has probable given their particular knowledge.

Right or wrong, at no point is faith used to determine whether or no evolution is right or wrong. Was it on faith that man KNEW that moon was a sphere before we ever sent a probe to the other side? Was it on faith that man KNEW the Poles existed before we ever visited them. Knowing something to be true, even without being able to see it doesn’t make it faith.

[TopQuark]

"Logically, everything that exists in time and space had an a priori cause."

What logic are you using? You must've said this in jest.

Consider Galilean law of inertia: a body travels through space-time at a constant velocity without any cause.

If resolved (in the negative) millennia-old misconception that any movement requires a cause.

Your statement is actually an affront on logic.

[Lucky Dog]

Or chance, or (like I mentioned earlier) …

Not to split hairs, but chance is defined by probability and statistics, which, like all mathematics, is a branch of logic. If something has already happened, e.g., existence, it has a probability of one. Such a tautology does not explain the original source of the chance. Additionally, some would argue that you are merely “naming” the source Deity, “Chance.”

The point is, we don’t know...none of us do. You won’t figure out if there is a god from physics.

While I agree with you that we cannot know from physics that there is a Supreme Creator, we do have evidence from which it is possible to tentatively infer such. That evidence is the background radiation from which the theory of the Big Bang Theory emerged. To my knowledge, there has been no competing theory that explains the existence of this background radiation as well as this theory.

If this theory is correct, there was a point of creation. In logic, only nothing can come from nothing. Therefore, a point of creation must logically have source. The existence of a Big Crunch preceding a Big Bang is nothing but pure speculation as there is no background radiation, nor any other observable phenomena to support it, i.e., it becomes an article of faith and we are back to religion.

Ergo, we are back to a statement I made previously:

There is no, non-faith-based, scientifically falsifiable explanation for the beginning of time and space, i.e., existence.

…Does a disapproval of evolution somehow make other theories more credible? …

Recall that I posited no counter-theory to evolution. I merely raised issues that the current theory of evolution does not adequately explain. The challenge to the theory of evolution that I cited was not whether, or not, there is a better theory, but whether the current theory is adequate.

A scientific theory, to be considered such, must be falsifiable. That is to say it must have some degree of predictive ability about the facts it purports to explain. Evolution of one species into another remains a phenomenon that has yet to be observed.

However, some would argue that this is an unfair statement since biologists cannot even agree on a definition of species. Therefore, let me broaden it as follows: evolution of one phylum into another remains a phenomenon that has yet to be observed. Of course, one counter–argument is that such an observation would require more time than is available to make such an observation.

It is exactly this requirement that weakens the theory of evolution. According to geologists there is a finite period of time that the earth has existed (around 4.54 billion years). Similarly, there is an even smaller amount of time that the earth’s environment has been one that would support life of any variety. While there is some disagreement on this number, it seems that the earliest anyone is willing to speculate on such a number is at least a half a billion years later. That gives us a number of about 4 x 10^9 (4,000,000,000 - nine zeroes after the decimal). However, there is no “evidence” of life in the geological record until well after that time. Still, we have a number, now.

Let us look at some probabilities. First, the driving mechanism of evolution is random mutation. (If it were anything other than random, there would be something, or someone, directing it.) The first problem is the existence of a suitable mutagen (source of the mutation). It must be what I call the “goldilocks” mutagen, one that is not so harsh that it destroys the organism and one that is not so weak that the organism is unaffected by it. There is obviously a probability that could be assigned to the existence of such a mutagen and given that most organisms do not have mutations, it is far less than one. R.A. Fisher’s work indicates that mutations can be expected to be well less than one in a million (a number with six zeroes).

There are only three possibilities for a mutation: beneficial, detrimental, or neutral. We must restrict our view to only those that are beneficial in terms of the environment as only those would make their possessor “more fit” (another tenant of evolution). Therefore, even if these mutations were equally probable (we know they are not as detrimental mutations are observed far more often), we have now added more zeroes after the decimal.

Beyond this potential difficulty, the mutation must be “heritable.” Evolution could not happen unless an organism could pass its increased “fitness” to the next generation. Therefore, we now have the probability of the “goldilocks” mutagen times the probability of beneficial mutation times the probability that the mutation is heritable. Of course, this is just for one beneficial mutation.

Unfortunately, a rather difficult issue becomes the requirement that beneficial mutations occur sequentially. That is to say, for example, they must build on each other, i.e., an organism must have evolved a “sensitivity to light” before a primitive eye could evolve and that before a more advanced eye, etc.

Given that we started with a probability of a beneficial mutation, a number with six zeroes after the decimal, we must now multiply it by the probability of a second beneficial mutation another number with a lot of zeroes after the decimal. And the process starts all over.

So far, the issue of how long a mutation takes to spread through out the population has not been considered or other things like “genetic drift” which tends to decrease the straight forward progression of beneficial mutations, or the generally increasing time required for more complex organizations to produce new generations, etc.

There is also an overarching issue that is unaddressed: entropy. This principle dictates that systems tend to change toward less organization over time. Evolution requires a violation of this observed principle. Of course, the old arguments rise here about open systems versus closed systems, etc. So, for the moment, let’s pass on this discussion.

I hope you have enjoyed this little dissertation and found it thought provoking.

[Lucky Dog]

Consider Galilean law of inertia: a body travels through space-time at a constant velocity without any cause.

There is no motion unless there is first a mover.

If resolved (in the negative) millennia-old misconception that any movement requires a cause.

Perhaps, you have heard of the "zero point" quandary? If not, I suggest you look it up.

[Oztrich Boy]

Fratricide II: Discovery Institute vs. Delugists

[Raymann]

Not to split hairs, but chance is defined by probability and statistics, which, like all mathematics, is a branch of logic. If something has already happened, e.g., existence, it has a probability of one. Such a tautology does not explain the original source of the chance. Additionally, some would argue that you are merely “naming” the source Deity, “Chance.”

By chance I was referring to simply another possibility, specifically the Singularity literally popping into existence like a virtual particle. Now all available evidence points to the big bang as the source of the universe. What exactly caused it to go boom? I don’t know…and there is nothing wrong with that answer. Neither does it mean though that there is a god. One of the worse arguments I hear a lot of conservatives make is when someone say science doesn’t have an answer, they automatically state that god is the cause.

To my knowledge, there has been no competing theory that explains the existence of this background radiation as well as this theory.

The only theory that I know of that explains CBR is the big bang. It holds that after the expansion of the universe started, naturally it begin to cool. 400,000 years after the big bang, it finally became cool enough for protons and electrons to join…when the universe become transparent they call it. The remaining free particles stayed, strongest in the microwave part of the spectrum and also begin to cool.

The existence of a Big Crunch preceding a Big Bang is nothing but pure speculation as there is no background radiation, nor any other observable phenomena to support it, i.e., it becomes an article of faith and we are back to religion.

Yeah that’s what I was doing, speculation…providing alternatives and all that. And at this point in our development in physics, all plausible.

Now on to evolution. Your explanation on what it is, is mostly correct. And your basic problem with the theory is that it has yet to be observed. Now from there the strictly logical thing to do would for everyone to admit they don’t know and we’ll all wait around another 20,000 years to see what happens. Or we could check our premises.

We know natural selection exists. They have the famous example of the moths in Britain as an example. Is it that hard to see that over a long period of time, small changes like that would build up?

And finally entropy, you’re right. But the Earth isn’t a closed system…it’s constantly get energy from it’s core, the sun, the CBR (another source of mutations).

[tpanther]

Apparently infighting is a good start. Heck, Christians and Muslims have been doing it for a couple thousand years. Heck, they even kill each other over incredibly minor differences from time to time.

ahhhh yes, those minor differences...like lopping off heads... stuck on stupid 7th century life...honor rape...

geeeeez liberals are sooooo insufferably stupid!

This reminds me of the stupid liberal bumper sticker that says "coexist".

[whattajoke]

It’s funny how you pinged your crew to your nonsensical post wherein you missed my point entirely.

“infighting” meant “the same faith arguing over stuff.” Most of it is minor (say, Presbyterians & Methodists) but some of it has been fairy severe (Catholics & Protestants).

In the Muslim world, the differences between Shia and Shiite is, as I said, “incredibly minor” and they seem to love killing each other over it.

Now please go look stupid on another thread.