What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)

You insult me when you tell me that I haven't read what you've said. You are welcome to your "religion and science are compatible" views. I think they are not. One is right; one is wrong. Ok, maybe I should have said you have read but don't understand what I said. No insult intended. You may be a bit thin skinned.

See, you dolt, you insult me again in your last sentence. What is wrong with you?

  Now if you were to ask me what was the "first cause", I would tell you that I don't know but I do know it wasn't Jesus. You have absolutely no doubt what the first cause was. Do you? Or am I putting words in your mouth? Yes, you are putting words in my mouth. I do not believe Jesus was the first cause and I personally have never met with the first cause or any of his messengers if there are any. No more than my dog understands who I am or how and why I put food in his bowl every day.

You said that you are a theist. But that was rather vague. If you believe "god" is the first cause, then who might that be? If you don't believe a "god" was the first cause, then how can you call yourself a theist? Deism? Yahweh did it? Allah? Buddha? Speak up, man, no comprendo tu.

gopher:

Nowadays, some theistic revisionists want to link talking snakes and holy water with atom smashers. I have no desire to link talking snakes and holy water with atom smashers. What ever gave you that idea?

Well, you claim to be a theist. You also claim to be science savvy. Looks to me you are mixing the two. If not, what you've been posting is obtuse. Why don't you try and put it on the table, lay it out, communicate better...hah?

hapless: But that's a far cry from the antireligious bigotry, based on profound ignorance and deep antipathy to Christianity, that passes for the scientism of Dawkins and his devotees. 

   You are just being your usual inane self. All the atheists that I've ever known are not "antireligious". If they were, they would not be atheists...they would be anti-theists. But you've been told this, time and time again. The reality is that YOU are a bigot and anti-atheistic. The onus is on you, son.

Dawkins does not have devotees. You've got it backwards, again. You are a devotee, a sheep, for Jesus. Which is OK by me. Whatever winds your clock. But don't tell me that I am anyone's devotee...I go it alone.

The profound ignorance and deep antipathy is your MO, not mine. I could site chapter and verse, all through the night, from the notes in the margins of my Bible about all the contradictory and stupendously ridiculous biblical writings.

If anyone is a fool and ignorant, it is you.

hapless: At gopher - one of the things that unite non-theists is their profound lack of curiosity regarding the rich diversity of religious tradition

   You are so full of crap as usual. Some of us know far more about various religious traditions, the history of religions... Have you, for example, read the Quran, Book of Mormon, Eqyptian Book of the Dead?

   No, you haven't. Yes, I have. So shut up already; you've just shown yourself to be stupid.

   When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me that if I would have the faith of a mustard seed, I could move *mountains. She was adamant. But I've found that such biblical pithies are absolutely worthless. They are just placebos for the sheep. Keeps them on the right track. 

    Why is it wrong? Don't think for yourself! That's the underlying, unspoken command. Just "believe" that and tithe, tithe, tithe. This is because the first religion was started when the first rogue met the first fool.

*Matthew 17:20: He replied, "Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

It seems to me that all biological replicators are also chemical replicators, but Elroch seems to find it convenient to make the terminological distinction between biological replicators (beginning with unicellular life) and chemical replicators (like RNA or DNA unsurrounded by a cell membrane). We *do* normally separate abiogenesis--the formation of life from nonliving molecules--from biological evolution.

Until self-replicators were sufficiently dense as to compete for resources, it might be hard to see how natural selection could have applied to them; nevertheless, the ones that were suited to the environment they formed in would be more likely to last long enough to make copies of themselves than those that weren't suited to the environment they formed in, so natural selection would still have applied.

gopher_the_throat: I do not know how to distinguish between an instance of natural selection and an instance of artificial selection (of the sort one might imagine God's using).

However, we have a naturalistic theory to account for how life evolved, and within that naturalistic theory, there is no need for any instances of artificial selection.

Science is, of course, based on methodological naturalism. If you're a detective, you don't ask how to distinguish between an instance of a person's stabbing someone and an instance of God's stabbing someone; you just gather evidence to try to figure out which human being did the stabbing. Science is much the same. Until a supernatural being is necessary to explain the phenomena, you don't invoke it.

I really like that stabbing analogy. Well done. 

The more serious reason for the distinction is a practical scientific one. The study of abiogenesis seems almost as different to the study of biology as the study of chemistry is to the study of physics. It shares with biochemistry, information about the behaviour of molecules, both individually and statistically, but works with very different methods in most cases.

However, the key reason it is useful to make the distinction in discussions like this is that the Hypothesis of Abiogenesis has a very different status to the Theory of Evolution. It is merely the most reasonable and economical hypothesis, and one which has not been falsified. (Years of work on inference has led me to a quantitative understanding of why Occam's razor is so successful, but the scientific method does not rely purely on such considerations). The Abiogenesis Hypothesis has some successful predictions (that evidence would be found that all of the necessary chemicals were likely to be available in the early Solar System, and that the process of chemical evolution can and does occur with some of these chemicals in generally plausible environments). The hypothesis of abiogenesis lacks anything corresponding to the fossil evidence that maps out the chronology of evolution of cellular life over 3.5 billion years with tens of thousands of observations of past lifeforms with the predicted types of relationships needed to fit into a picture of (genetically) gradual evolution. We will eventually be able to map out all of the chemical processes necessary to the emergence of a replicating cell that was a common ancestor of all life and to determine the statistical aspects of this process, but if my understanding is correct, we will never have the equivalent of the fossil record on Earth, because that information has been lost -  there may be simply no analog of fossils that provides snapshots of some partial stage of chemical evolution.

This is the reason that in every discussion of Biological Evolution, creationists spend large amounts of time arguing against abiogenesis (when they are aren't arguing against the Big Bang theory, or the various hypotheses for the "cause" of the Big Bang), despite the fact that these are entirely non-intersecting scientific questions. Arguing against Biological Evolution is arguing against successful predictions and hard evidence for what happened when, and how what happened at different times related to earlier times and to later times, in tens of thousands of examples, and I can understand why science-denialists prefer to fight where they don't start from a dead lost position.

   In short, they know that there are things that science doesn't know (at this time...perhaps even forever), and they would rather focus on that. Unless, I have misunderstood you.

   They perceive that lack of knowledge by scientists is akin to having invalid knowledge.

   I have absolutely no qualms about saying that I am ignorant of many things. Believers consider that to be a flaw. If that is true, then I am very flawed; although I would claim simple ignorance. Chess is just one example...lol.

   btw...I am a big fan of Occam's Razor. Saying that, theists believe that the simplest and truest cause of "everything" is God. Somehow, I think that this is either a misapplication or a flaw in the razor.

Exactly. Indeed you will often find the more science denialist theists jeering at science because it does not provide all of the answers, forgetting that their writings have provided no useful (or predictive) answers at all to objective scientific questions about the real world. Scientific methods have been strikingly more successful at answering such questions.  Important examples are questions about the behaviour of our own bodies and of other living things.

To me the lack of any useful answers is more of a reason for doubt than not providing all answers.  Of course, I welcome all offers of counterexamples from religious participants, especially the more science denialist ones.

Without getting technical, I will say that a hypothesis like an entity that can do anything is stupendously worse according to Occam's razor than a process that is constrained in a very strong way (evolution = replications of the type we are very familiar with in living organisms + mutations of the types that have been extensively studied in living organisms). One way of seeing why is to ask what evidence would falsify the existence of an omnipotent being (the answer is "none". Such a being can explain any evidence).

With scientific theories, almost any imaginable evidence would falsify the theory, but the evidence that is observed is highly constrained to the tiny subset that is compatible with the theory. [To get too technical for this discussion, this can be quantified with a general analog of phase space volumes]. To express the point another way, with specific (observed or scientific) data and two hypotheses with which it is compatible, the strength of the evidence is greater for the less flexible hypothesis. Bayesian statistics provides precise definitions and ways to calculate hard numbers for these concepts, and uses the term "evidence" to refer to a number which quantifies the relative success of a hypothesis to explain the data.

    Too (and I don't mean this critically) most people are comfortable with their beliefs and really don't want facts that may undermine their beliefs. I am saying this as an observation, not a condemnation. In fact, almost everyone around me (including my adult children) are sailing on this boat.

   To seek the truth behind the curtain is quixotic. It is not for everyone.

But I've been beyond the curtain PW. and have seen the glorious revelations that await the wise man.😉

   I'm very happy for you, e99.

   Now, Elroch, you've said:

   "Without getting technical, I will say that a hypothesis like an entity that can do anything is stupendously worse according to Occam's razor than a process that is constrained in a very strong way (replications of the type we are very familiar with in living organisms, and mutations of the types that have been extensively studied in living organisms). One way of seeing why is to ask what evidence would falsify the existence of an omnipotent being (the answer is "none". Such a being can explain any evidence)."

   As a technical writer and editor (over 35 years ago...I'm rusty at this time ) please allow me to clarify for the layman (your non-peers) :

   To simplify, a god who can do anything is actually far more complicated than the well understood replication and mutation processes of genes. Hence, the former fails according to Occam's Razor. For example, how could there be any evidence to negate the existence of such a god? There can't be; such a god can substantiate everything.

   Sorry if I butchered your intent. Old habits die hard, and I still seem to have a need to view things through Occam's Razor (editorially), without "watering down" (unless through error), in order to better comprehend.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Postscript: I take it to mean that "you can't prove a negative", in regard to such a god. That's the beauty of it. The priesthood outdid themselves when they first developed the concept. It doesn't have to make sense, and you can't prove it wrong!

I would put the point a bit differently. If you run an experiment and there are twenty different possible outcomes, an omnipotent God could have made any of the twenty happen. So, none of the possible outcomes would conflict with the hypothesis of their being an omnipotent God--which means none of them can count *for* the hypothesis, either.

Normally, the whole point of running the experiment is that you know that various possible outcomes would conflict with your hypothesis, so that if you only get the one outcome that *doesn't* conflict with your hypothesis, you can take that as (partial) confirmation of your hypothesis. But in the case of an omnipotent God, no experiment you could run could have an outcome inconsistent with the hypothesis of there being an omnipotent God--so you can't get (partial) confirmation of the hypothesis. The hypothesis of an omnipotent God is immune to hypothesis testing.

The theory of evolution is a theory just like any other one, new facts and their interpretation will either support or discredit the theory, I did say interpretation because not all deducted conclusion is always true.

To be able to conclude anything from any set of information is not easy as most times the information is incomplete to lead to the conclusion drawn.

So researchers make assumptions which are really educated guesses and come to an incomplete conclusion based on their postulate.

The biggest element the theory of evolution is not considering is the defective mutations of stem cells in our DNA that produces other genes that at times are destructive and at times productive for a new specie. In other words the more time cell division occurs and replicates themselves the more chance that the resulting cell is defective why you ask?

Do not know the answer but as we all get older, humans, animals and plants we are likely to miss key components that have aged and thus do not carry the complete message to the new cell in it's replication.

Well again, just a theory!

I am so happy now that you have enlightened me. I accept everything you say. There is no god. There is no soul or purpose in our universe, except for the ones we have created for ourselves, just random events competing for optimal outcomes. What appears to be negative entropy is just a phenomenon resulting from vast amounts of time, space and opportunities. If you drop a sufficiently large number of saucers, a cup will be formed. I am just a soulless mass of proteins, enzymes and lipids called life and there are no ethical demands except the ones I created for myself. Thank you for revealing the truth.

Meaning, purpose, and ethics do not derive from being created by God and do not depend on being created by God.