extended quote of the day
Posted by Luke Schierer under evolution | Permalink | | Leave A Comment
Let me be clear. I am not saying the origin of life was simply an extremely improbable accident. I am saying the origin of life was deliberately, purposely arranged, just as the fundamental laws and constants and many other anthropic features of nature were deliberately, purposely arranged. But in what I’ll call the “extended-fine-tuning” view, the origin of life is merely an additional planned feature culminating in intelligent life. The origin of life is simply closer to the very same goal that other, more distant anthropic features (laws, chemical properties, and so forth) were also put in place to bring about. Nonetheless, just as it was possible to discover a set of proximate conditions that would lead to the origin of the moon, it may also be possible to arrange a local set of conditions that would lead to life, and that would be a scientifically interesting project. If it succeeded, some would claim that it revealed that life needed no miracle. But in fact it would show the beginning of life needed a directing intelligence.1[emphasis added]
This is an important thought. A key quote. It contains many ideas all of which are central to Intelligent Design. It contains one thought, at the end, that many people cannot grasp. If I do something, if I will an end and achieve it, then I have not proved that it could happen without someone to will it. I have not proved that it is possible for it to happen randomly. It is possible, it may even be likely, that it is only with intervention that it can possibly happen. Take weighted dice. Not just slightly weighted dice that increase your odds, but do not guarantee a particular outcome, but massively weighted dice. Dice that if you drop them, will always land with a given face up. You would have to place such dice for them to land with the weighted face up, the reverse of what physics tells you should happen. So too, it is possible that my experiment only shows that intelligence can cause something.
For evolution to be true, and not just possible, something more is needed. The bar is higher. The scientists must prove that something can happen as a result of undirected, unwilled chance. Not only that, but for it to form a realistic explanation, they must show that it is likely to have happened.
It is possible, so I am told by physicists, that the universe could just wink out of existence in a singular quantum event. It is possible, according to that physics, that we winked into existence in precisely the same manner one second before you read this. Neither are particularly likely. Neither make particularly believable or useful explanations.
Evolution might be possible. I do not think so, from what I have read, but it might be. I sincerely doubt anyone could argue that it is likely enough to make a believable explanation.
All the rest is very true. There is a very long list of things that have to be just so for us to be here. It defies probability. It stretches probability that we exist anywhere. Some authors say it even defies probability that we are here anywhere.
If you ask me to believe that there are a multitude of universes, one for each throw of each coin, and that is the best you can do to make sense of the universe, you can take your materialist theories and smoke them. They are not worth the paper it would take to print them; you have come up with something no more scientific than either of the creation stories found in the Bible. Any of the three resulting stories (one from the materialists, two from the Bible) might in a literal, historical, sense be true. None of them qualify as a scientific theory.
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Dr. Michael J. Behe. The Edge of Evolution ISBN-13:978-0-7432-9620-5. ISBN-10:0-7432-9620-6 Page 216. ↩
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Greetings Luke,
My belief in evolution is based on the number of samples. With a single universe being so big that it tends to infinite, any probable event has a close to infinite number of chances to happen.
Seeya! hri
That does not explain the nearly infinite odds against the universe having laws that allow for life. Nor has it really been proven that the universe “tends to[wards being] infinite.”
Infinity is a troubling concept in and of itself though. For if you advocate that we can treat the universe as being infinite, you are advancing the notion that not only can anything happen, but that it must. Not just can intelligent life exist here on Earth, but there must be someone somewhere out there with your exact memories, holding this conversation with someone else who has my exact memories. The odds of that, assuming we are in fact the result of a random undirected process, and that all we do and think can be explained in such terms, are incredibly low. But in an infinite universe, everything must happen.
In short, believing in a truly infinite universe is a much bigger proposition to ask someone to accept than a Creator.
Any of those being granted though, evolution would still not be proven. There are no samples for your belief to be based on.
Well, the good thing about science is that the samples come as experimentation goes, while pure faith doesn’t even care about sampling, since believing is an end in itself with no need for proof. In the other hand, the concept of a Creator as an entity with a conscience seems to be a bit unexplainable to me. For someone that considers that as true, I see only two options. Either the Creator always existed as in a timeless thing, or it was itself created by an even “higher” Creator. In the first case, I fail to understand why a timeless entity would care to give a kick-start to our Universe, then sit down and watch what would happen other than for its own amusement. Amusement, by the way, seems to be a human concept that shouldn’t be applicable to an omniscient and omnipresent entity. I find that less credible than the relationship between a very big space plus a very long time and the odds you raised. The second case, which sounds more likely to me, tends to an infinite number of “Creator layers”. In that case, believing in and worshiping our Creator would be to deal with a middle man. Someone that is actually quite sloppy when it deals to communicating its intentions. Even quite sadistic for putting all life under such a range of stressful tests. Worse, the concept of “love” defined by most religions doesn’t fit in the blackmailing preached by the same religions: “I love you, no matter what you do or what you are” versus “worship me and you’ll sit by my side for all eternity, negate me and you’ll burn instead”.
The testing has been going on for over 100 years now on evolution. Things that once appeared to favor it have now been disproven. Worse, new evidence has come to light that is entirely and radically incompatible with it. When does it stop being a scientific theory, and start being the sort of blind faith you describe? I assert that anyone who thinks evolution is true is operating far more on blind faith than I am.
Which brings me to the the concept of a Creator. I do believe in a creator, but that is not at issue here. The fact of the matter is that the experimental evidence, as discussed in both the work I quote here and in other works, points to a Creator. The evidence speaks nothing as to the nature of that Creator.
As far as science goes, the Creator could be one in a long line of creators, or it could be the sort of eternal timeless Being proposed by the Christian faith (among others). Science does not say, and so I do not address it here.
You may not be able to understand why the Creator created. But that does not disprove the evidence pointing to the Creator’s existence.
By the way, I do not propose that the Creator did so out of boredom or amusement. But at this point in our ability to research, such arguments are for philosophy, including but not limited to logical analysis, and not for science. I would like to limit this thread to scientific concerns.
To summarize again, there is no proof for evolution. There is disproof of it.
The existing evidence supports the idea of a Creator. There is no evidence that does not match this hypothesis.
As a scientist, you are going to tell me that you chose to believe in evolution, despite the evidence against it, just because you cannot understand the Creator? Where does “I do not understand” or “I do not like this idea” fit into the principles of science?
It’s just a matter of seeking arguments from both sides. If you look carefully, you’ll find how the “disproof” of evolution is misleading and how the “evidence” of a Creator is not as certain as it could seem. Here are two interesting examples:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/paul_doland/creator.html http://www.csicop.org/intelligentdesignwatch/probability-one.html
This discussion reminds me of the Torah Code. A lot of people find it so amazing that it’s possible to find words related to the same topic in a same, “small” region of the bible, and that the probability of having that is so low (5 to 6 sigma, a really impressive number when dealing with probability), that it must have been intentional, therefore proving the existence of the code. They forget or ignore, though, that (1) Hebrew is particularly open to multiple spellings of a same word, (2) it has no vowels when written and (3) the bible is long enough to make such probabilities possible. The proof of that is that the same experiment can be repeated over Hebrew versions of “War and Peace” and “Moby Dick”, with even better results.
I mention that because the root of both discussions is the same: probability.
Right. It is very important to keep in mind the size of the body you are looking at. I am doing that, you are not. You wrongly assume that you have enough time, enough generations, enough individuals for the number of mutations necessary to crop up.
I can predict the objection I am going to get. You do not have enough time, enough generations, even given an old Earth. Modern humans go back at least 150,000 years. Modern evidence also shrinks the amount of time available to go from no life to your basic single celled organism. Even with an old Earth, you do not have anywhere near enough time or generations.
From this point on, the argument runs in circles. It all turns around whether the size of the Universe and it’s assumed age is enough or not to make a small probability such as our current Earth possible as it is in a random sequence of events. You believe it’s not, from what I understand, because the probability is very, very small. I believe it is because of what is currently believed about the age and size of the Universe. The age is not really known, but is extrapolated to be something between 10 to 20 billion years. That gives plenty of time for small deviations making it more or less likely for a planet to contain life as Earth has today. In a way, that I also believe in the possibility of other planets reaching Earth’s stage at an earlier or later time with some thousand, even tens or hundreds of thousand years of deviation. About the size, then, it’s so big that nobody is able to give a good guess. The best arrived yet is to try to get a lower boundary from what’s visible from Earth. This lower boundary alone is believed to be around 50 billion light years, or 475,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers. In our galaxy alone, there are 100 billion stars like our Sun. Put that against the number of visible galaxies and see what you get.
The age of the universe really doesn’t help you. You need the Earth to be FAR FAR older than anyone predicts it is. You need to go from a single cell (I’ll even go so far as to grant you that the first cell might have been seeded by a comet or similar) to the diversity of life we see now.
You do not have 10 to 20 billion years for this to happen in. If the mutation you need to step forward on earth happened on some other planet in some other galaxy, it does you absolutely no good.
On the cosmology side of things, the numbers get mind-bogglingly big very very fast. I do not think that the numbers you give really produce any meaningful likelihood of Earth developing. The conditions for Earth really are that rare. You think they do. I doubt we could get anywhere arguing that.
That’s the blocking point from the start. For you, the mind-boggling big number is the age/size of the Universe. For me, it’s the probability used to base your point. Just that in the case of the probability, it’s actually a mind-boggling small number if you look at the equation as a whole, but it’s still mind-boggling.
When we reach the point of mind-boggling numbers, its always best to go back to actual sources, such as the book I’m referencing.
While searching for references about the book, I stumbled upon this nice synthesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_of_Evolution Apparently, this book (or the idea behind it?) is very close to the Torah Code analogy I made before: misused probability allied to ignoring relevant contradictory facts equals public amusement, but not necessarily a scientific discovery. In other words, it seems to be closer to conspiracy theories such as “We Never Went To The Moon” than “The Universe in a Nutshell”. Again, I wouldn’t suggest taking that book as reference without examining the replies. Anyway, it was a very interesting debate. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And to think I found it by accident while reading the Pidgin news…
I have examined the replies. I find them lacking. Many of them leave you wondering if the author of the reply actually read the book.
How is it misusing probability? Am I misusing probability to say that, if I’m in a poker game and the other person gets 4 aces on 4 consecutive hands of 5 card stud, that something fishy is going on? Not all uses of probability are as invalid as the Torah Code example you gave.
Which example is closer to the truth? You do not know that yours is, because you do not really know the the size of the space that events have happened in, nor the number of different possibilities.
The misuse of the probability arises when the conditions applied to calculate it are not related as they seem or other conditions are missing. For example, if you come up with a precise, calculated probability for evolution and you multiply it by the number of stars believed to exist in the Universe (280 billion square 2), you could easily top close, or even over 1/1, which would not be a valid number. I could easily accept that this example is a misuse of probability and the reason is clear. Your number would not have specified “number of stars” being equal to 1 as a prerequisite to its calculation. This is just an example. “Now how does this affect my nice, astonishing probability number”, you may ask. Simple… the calculation of the probability only has to take in consideration one factor that is completely unrelated to the evolution theory to be flawed. In the links I mentioned before, you’ll find many indications of such factors, and actually it’s easy to imagine how such factors would be present. Life still so complex to us that it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to come up with a nice and polished probability number regarding its evolution. I don’t know for a fact that the evolution theory is absolutely true, but I find that there are enough indications that it’s closer to the truth than what ID tries to argue. The magic about any “creator” theory is that it can easily explain everything. Even if in the next minute you change your mind and accept evolution as the most probable explanation for our current existence, you can still say that the Creator made things as they are so that evolution would hold like it does. For me, that’s just the easy way out, just like our ancestors liked to believe that a lightning would have stricken their apple tree because the Creator wasn’t happy with them instead of understanding that it was only a matter of static electricity.
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