Posted on 12/21/2004 7:59:02 PM PST by postitnews.com
HARRISBURG, PA-The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and attorneys with Pepper Hamilton LLP filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of 11 parents who say that presenting "intelligent design" in public school science classrooms violates their religious liberty by promoting particular religious beliefs to their children under the guise of science education.
"Teaching students about religion's role in world history and culture is proper, but disguising a particular religious belief as science is not," said ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Witold Walczak. "Intelligent design is a Trojan Horse for bringing religious creationism back into public school science classes."
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United Executive Director, added, "Public schools are not Sunday schools, and we must resist any efforts to make them so. There is an evolving attack under way on sound science...Read More
(Excerpt) Read more at postitnews.com ...
I am happy that we can all still be silly from time to time.
Merry Christmas!
to all, and to all a good night.
"As I suspected, you are just a poseur and have requested nothing."
OK, idiot, give me a probabilistic analysis of the development of the eye. Dawkins never did it, nor did he ever cite anyone else who did. All he does is repeat over and over that random mutation combined with natural selection can do amazing things and give the "appearance" of intelligent design. Ya? How amazing?
Suppose I told you that I am going to develop a computer operating system according to the NDT model. I'm going to start off with random bits and distribute it to millions of "users". Then I'll have them randomly change bits on occasion, and if some benefit results we'll "select" that "mutation." What do you suppose the chances would be of coming up with a functional operation system? Not very good in the short term, eh? How about the long term, say the next 4 billion years?
Just for the sake of argument, let's say we start off with a functional operation system, say Linux 1.0. Now, what do you suppose the probability is of a randomly flipped bit actually improving the function of the operating system? Is it 50/50? Of course not. The probability is probably less than 1 in 10,000. So ask yourself which will happen first: will it "evolve" to Linux 2.0, or will it go "extinct"?
The theory of evolution says that life itself, which is infinitely more complex than any computer operation system, "evolved" by a similar mechanism, with absolutely no "intelligent" input. Yet, no evolutionist has ever even bothered to compute the probabilities. Dawkins waves his arms and you chumps are all amazed at his brilliance. He doesn't even understant the problem -- and people like you have no clue. But you are very good at browbeating people with the scientific "consensus" -- because you are either incapable of thinking for yourself or unwilling to do so.
Gee, shit-for-brains dumbass, let me point out that you haven't defined which "eye" you want analyzed and that is important since they have evolved independently several times. Or didn't you know even that much of natural history?
Just for the sake of argument, let's say we start off with a functional operation system, say Linux 1.0. Now, what do you suppose the probability is of a randomly flipped bit actually improving the function of the operating system?
Well, gee, shit-for-brains dumbass, is there a mechanism that randomly flips bits in your universe, because I don't see it in mine.
The theory of evolution says that life itself, which is infinitely more complex than any computer operation system,
Gee, shit-for-brains dumbass, you really are more stupid than I thought. Life is not a computer program and the Theory of Evolution does not say that.
Yet, no evolutionist has ever even bothered to compute the probabilities.
I ask you again, shit-for-brains dumbass, the probability of what? With what initial conditions? Or are you just too stupid to understand that question?
Dawkins waves his arms and you chumps are all amazed at his brilliance. He doesn't even understant the problem -- and people like you have no clue.
Hey, shit-for-brains dumbass, I'm not Dawkins, Dawkins doesn't speak for me, and I don't give a sh!t about Dawkins, although he, at least, can spell. How 'bout you? Do you have a point to make? Can you articulate a direct question, I suggest you make it in short, to-the-point sentences if you are capable of such?
But you are very good at browbeating people with the scientific "consensus" -- because you are either incapable of thinking for yourself or unwilling to do so.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!
Have I browbeat you, shit-for-brains dumbass, or are you just out to ruin Christmas for everybody??
Oh, golly gosh, you got me, genius. How about the human eye? Or how about the grasshopper eye? Or how about any eye you can think of, you pathetic moron. Which one isn't the point. Is that "specific" enough for you, moron? You're real good at dodging the question -- and throwing childish tantrums. I can just imagine you holding your breath and stomping on the floor when you replied.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say we start off with a functional operation system, say Linux 1.0. Now, what do you suppose the probability is of a randomly flipped bit actually improving the function of the operating system?
Well, gee, shit-for-brains dumbass, is there a mechanism that randomly flips bits in your universe, because I don't see it in mine.
The NDT is based on random mutations. If you can't see the analogy with randomly flipped bits ... well, I don't know what to tell you.
Gee, shit-for-brains dumbass, you really are more stupid than I thought. Life is not a computer program and the Theory of Evolution does not say that.
Nor did I say that life is a computer program in a literal sense. But the genetic code has been compared to a program by many reasonable folks, including many evolutionists. If you cannot see the analogy between a series of bits and a series of amino acids, well .. I guess you really are a moron.
Yet, no evolutionist has ever even bothered to compute the probabilities.
I ask you again, shit-for-brains dumbass, the probability of what? With what initial conditions? Or are you just too stupid to understand that question?
The probability of human evolution. The probability of monkey evolution. The probabality of the first living cell coming into being with no intelligence involved. I guess I need to spoon feed it to you, eh?
Hey, shit-for-brains dumbass, I'm not Dawkins, Dawkins doesn't speak for me, and I don't give a sh!t about Dawkins, although he, at least, can spell. How 'bout you? Do you have a point to make? Can you articulate a direct question, I suggest you make it in short, to-the-point sentences if you are capable of such?
Funny, I don't remember saying that you are Dawkins. I guess your reading comprehension is not too high, eh?
The important question here is why I am wasting my time arguing with a child.
By the way, I scored in the top 1% of the Graduate Records exam (taken by engineering graduates to get into graduate school). How did you do, moron?
I ask you again, shit-for-brains dumbass, the probability of what? With what initial conditions? Or are you just too stupid to understand that question?
Let me try this one more time. My point was that, as far as I know, no evolutionist has ever bothered to compute the probability of *anything* having to do with evolution. We can argue all day about whether Spetner's probability calculations are correct or not, but he at least *attempted* to compute probabilities.
Now you come back and demand to know what specifically I want the probability computed for. I want you to refer me to any probabilities *ever* computed by an evolutionist and cited in support of the NDT. They don't do it because they don't think they need to. And they don't think they need to calculate any probabilities because they do not understand the problem of explaining the complexity of life with no intelligent design or guidance. Richard Dawkins says it's possible, and that's apparently good enough for them.
Permit me, gentlemen, to jump in here.
RussP, I would like to propose a very simple computational problem for you. Never mind the odds against an eye's evolving. That's way too difficult for me on Christmas morning. Let's find an easier problem. Let's work with a mere 10 human generations (this is not only easier than the problems you've been proposing, but it neatly avoids that messy "ape ancestry" stuff).
RussP, go back about 2 or 3 centuries to your great-great-etc. grandparents, ten generations ago. Now, for each one of them, and then later for all of them, compute the odds that each would encounter and marry his (or her) spouse. That's for openers.
Then, for their children -- the nineth generation before you -- compute the odds that each one of those ancestors got born. It requires that their parents had to copulate at just the right time, when just the right ovum was produced, to somehow encounter just the right spermatozoan at the moment of ancestral ecstasy. Each conception event is a bit of a long-shot, but go right ahead and do the computation.
Now compute the odds for each ancestor of the 9th generation. Then compute the odds that all of them would get born.
Then (assuming, for simplicity's sake, no difficulties in those children surviving to adulthood) do the earlier-described computation about the odds that each of this new generation would encounter his/her spouse. And then the odds that they would produce each of your 8th generation ancestors. Having done that for each one, now compute the odds that all of them would meet as required and then produce the necessary offspring.
Now repeat for the 7th generation. Then the 6th. Etc. When you've done all that, do the final computation and compute the odds against all of these events happening for all ten generations.
When you've got that all worked out, RussP, you will have done what no one has ever done before -- you will have computed the odds against your own existence, given the initial conditions of ten generations ago. And after you've done that, perhaps you will go back and read your recent posts again, and maybe reconsider what you said in them.
Doesn't your scenario involve a series of conscious choices in which the odds of successful mating and birth are very high, as opposed to random swapping of info?
In other words, Russ' great-great-etc. grandfather was not choosing a mate blindly from a selection of women who mostly could not reproduce. He was CHOOSING a mate from among millions (theoretically on a worldwide basis) of women who mostly had the ability to have babies.
Ditto for the sex acts in question. Are the odds a million-to-one against a married couple being able to produce offspring, even if the try?
Why we each individually are who we are is a mystery. But the choices of mates and the sex acts that produced us and our ancestors were not blind random acts, each of which had odds of thousands or millions to one against leading to conception.
If your analogy fit, shouldn't we expect to see raccoons evolve into other species just as frequently as we see raccoons mate and give birth to other raccoons? The latter occurs millions of times per year, while we've never observed the former occurring.
Now, you could say the odds of a particular raccoon being born are low, but we know raccoons are born, just as we know someone will win the lottery, even if the odds are a million-to-one against it.
Doesn't conscious choice....or in the case of raccoons, mating instinct...alter odds? In the case of the lottery, we know someone will win because someone's number comes up. That number exists because it was deliberately printed on a lottery ticket, one of perhaps a million tickets sold to lottery players. The odds are 100% that someone will eventually win, even if the odds are heavily against one particular person doing so.
Likewise, the odds are pretty strong that someone chooses a mate that can reproduce. We can probably be safe in assuming that most marital pairings can produce offspring. Some people are sterile or barren, but the chances of a young married couple being able to have kids has to be very strong. We don't know who will be born but the chances are very high (not 100% but close to it) that someone will.
Would a lottery produce a winner every time if the odds of a winner emerging, as opposed to the odds of a particular person winning, were a million-to-one? What if failing to win could bankrupt you? How long would lotteries survive?
What if the chances of finding a fertile mate who could produce healthy offspring were 100,000 to one? The other 99,999 pairings produce either nothing or detrimental freaks. Would we expect to see a populated world of more highly evolved people?
I'm not a math expert, so I may have screwed something up in my calculations. I'm sure someone will correct me if I did!
I hope this issue can be discussed the calm way you have done it in your post.
BTW, just to clarify, in my analogies above the odds in question are "against". The odds being a million-to-one AGAINST a winner emerging in a lottery, and 100,000 to one AGAINST finding a mate who could produce healthy offspring. I may not have made that clear the way I phrased it.
So what is the purpose of doing such calculations? What do they tell us? You're here. I'm here. Each moment in the world is a blindingly complicated mix of factors. We can't compute all the variables, yet from our knowledge of physics and chemistry, as we look around we can be fairly confident that each moment of the day things are functioning in accordance with their nature. We don't see impossible things happening all around us. It's true (trivially true) that the hypothetical "odds" against things being the way they are today are astronomically high. But so what? Today is obviously not impossible.
So here's the bottom line: long chains of natural causes and consequences happen all the time. In fact, that's what reality is made of. Except for the simplest systems (like the movement of the planets), from any arbitrarily selected starting point (like 10 generations ago) the future cannot be predicted because it's just too complicated. But that doesn't justify anyone in looking back over 10 generations and claiming that it was all an impossible miracle. Thus we have PatrickHenry's law of reality: If each momentary event is natural, the historical totality is natural.
I have discussed this silly business of "calculating the odds" here from time to time, and I've even given it a name: the fallacy of retrospective astonishment. I've also discussed it with logicians and academic philosophers. It seems to be a genuine fallacy.
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHA! You are about as funny as a rubber crutch.
Hey, "moron" (is that your favorite word?), buy a clue - a posteriori probabilities are pretty easy - guess why?
The NDT is based on random mutations. If you can't see the analogy with randomly flipped bits ... well, I don't know what to tell you.
Computer programs don't breed, swap code, or die. Or did you just overlook the obvious one more time?
The probability of human evolution.
See above, probability 1.0.
The probability of monkey evolution.
See above, probability 1.0.
The probability of the first living cell coming into being with no intelligence involved.
Unknown, could be zero, could be one.
The important question here is why I am wasting my time arguing with a child.
No, you got it wrong again, the question for you is "why I am wasting my time arguing with like a child."
By the way, I scored in the top 1% of the Graduate Records exam (taken by engineering graduates to get into graduate school). How did you do, moron?
Better than you and that was when it meant something. Gee, does that mean you are even stupider than a "moron"? What a surprise - not.
Oh, and the next time you demonstrate your childishness by Freepmailing me with a load of your "best" profanity and unbelievable ignorance, I'll track down your mother and send it to her with your compliments.
The probability of anything happening that has already happened in one.
Since a number of quite different eyes have developed, we do not need to imagine that ours is the only kind that could have evolved.
You bring up an interesting point. I have thought about this before. It is somewhat peripheral to the discussion of evolution but interesting nonetheless. Given the purely naturalistic (athiestic) view of the world, at some time in the distant past, what were my chances of being born?
I wouldn't have been born had my parents not met, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. But it goes even deeper than that. Suppose a different sperm cell had penetrated the egg? Would my brother have been born rather than me? A single ejaculation produces something like a quarter of a billion sperm cells. Multiply out all those odds, and the odds against my existence were truly astronomical. But here I am. To my way of thinking, that is a powerful argument *against* the naturalist premise we started with.
Then there's the whole question of consciousness. I never understood how the evolutionists think they can explain consciousness. They seem to confuse it with complexity, but the two are clearly different. No matter how complex a computer or robot may be, I don't think it can ever be a conscious being. So even if we assume, as naturalists do, that purely naturalistic evolution can create complexity, how can it produce consciousness? But then, I doubt many evolutionists even understand this profound philosophical problem.
That brings me to another interesting point about faith. Athiests are constantly chiding believers for believing in a Supreme Deity on the basis of "faith." Well, let's consider what we all, athiests included, believe based on faith alone. How do you know, and how could you possibly ever know, that anyone else out there other than yourself is a conscious being? I contend that there is no way to possibly know that. Certainly it cannot be proven scientifically. Yet we all believe that conscious beings other ourselves exist. Even the athiests believe it. Why? Well, they take on faith, of course.
See above, probability 1.0.
The probability of monkey evolution.
See above, probability 1.0.
I meant the probability of human evolution without any intelligent design or intervention, of course. That should have been obvious, but I forgot that I need to spoon feed it to you -- just like you need to define the word "is" when you ask Bill Clinton a question.
Nevertheless, the fact that you put the probability at 1.0 tells me something very significant. You apparently believe that science has "proven" evolution as mathematicians prove a theorem. You do not even understand the most basic principles of science. No scientific theory can *ever* be proven with absolute certainty. But your assignment of 1.0 to the probability of human evolution shows that you think that evolution *has* been proven with absolute certainty. You are truly an unwise man.
The next time you make a veiled public threat to my mother, I'll report it to FreeRepublic, Mr. Gun Enthusiast.
Of course it is. But the question is not whether it happened but *how* it happened. If you find 1,000 pennies lying on the floor, and every one is showing heads, yes the probability is 1 that 1000 pennies are lying on the floor showing heads. But if you didn't see the coins tossed, what is the probability that it happened by purely random chance? Is that 1 also? I don't think so.
"If you want ID taught in schools, fine. But under no circumstances may it be taught in science class, since scientists unanimously agree it is NOT science."
By the way, it takes more faith and less reason to believe the so-called "scientific" explanations than to accept the conclusions of the ID people.
Guess we'll all find out who's correct soon enough now, won't we?
In the meantime, why not let there be a free marketplace of ideas presented to students and let each generation decide for themselves. What's to fear?
You surely realize that you have no basis for assuming that you're the only one around here who is capable of philosophical thought. When you've been in these threads for a while, you may modify your opinions. You'd be amazed at the quality of the people you'll encounter in the science threads. Meanwhile, tossing zingers like that into your posts doesn't really encourage much conversation. Mull it over.
Anyway, there are a number of incorrect assumptions I think you're making, and I don't have the time today to get into them all, so I'll merely list them with a brief comment as to each:
1. "Given the purely naturalistic (athiestic) view of the world ..."
I assume you believe that the scientific view is entirely naturalistic, and therefore atheistic. That's just not true. More on this another time.
2. "But here I am. To my way of thinking, that is a powerful argument *against* the naturalist premise we started with."
That's a good example of the fallacy of retrospective astonishment, which I described in a few prior posts.
3. "I never understood how the evolutionists think they can explain consciousness."
Scientists don't have a good handle on that as of yet. But the default conclusion for an unresolved problem isn't that it's a miracle.
4. "Well, let's consider what we all, athiests included, believe based on faith alone."
Two problems here. First, I think you're assuming that everyone who accepts evolution is an atheist. That's untrue. Second, I believe that you are mis-using the term "faith." This is something I've posted before, but it's useful here to clarify the terminology:
One can "believe" in the existence of the tooth fairy, but one does not -- in the same sense of the word -- "believe" in the existence of his own mother. Belief in the first proposition (tooth fairy) requires faith, which is the belief in something for which there is no evidence or logical proof. That's the way philosophy defines the term.
The second proposition (mother) is the kind of knowledge which follows from sensory evidence. There is also that kind of knowledge (like the Pythagorean theorem) which follows from logical proof. In either case -- that is, belief in things perceived by sensory evidence or demonstrated by logical proof -- there is no need for faith, so that term is inapplicable in that context.
In between mother and the Pythagorean theorem are those propositions we provisionally accept (or in common usage "believe"), like relativity and evolution, because they are scientific theories -- logical and falsifiable explanations of the available data (which data is knowledge obtained via sensory evidence).
Useful website in this context: Do You Believe in Evolution?
What you ignore is selection. In a long series of coin tosses there will be a thousand heads. If you ignore the heads and only report the tails, you get your series of a thousand.
In evolution, those variations that are not helpful tend to drop out, so that in the population as a whole, only neutral and beneficial variations are common. The dice aren't rigged, but the game is. You keep your winnings but don't have to pay for your losses.
All this is possible because there is a source of free gambling money, the sun.
The results are not random. They are shaped by selection. The survivbal of any individual is the result of luck, but the species has much better odds
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