Evolution

[LightWolf]

Last time on the Flat Earth thread...

No it is not reasonable to ask for an example of a species branching off in real time. You post an article saying "the Cambrian explosion may have happened much faster than originally thought" without apparently reading it: 20 million years. You also talk about two different species of finches mating and producing a hybrid offspring, not the same thing!

Also how would you tell if some species is in a transitional state? Are you going to observe and document every generation for tens of thousands of generations? Do you think any human researcher or even research organization has sufficient lifespan to even document such a change? Do you have any idea how long it took for single celled organisms to become people and dogs? Is the species you decide to observe actually experiencing any selective evolutionary pressure that could even potentially make it transition into something else? Do you even understand that said selective evolutionary pressure generally means the origin species goes extinct and won't be around to observe and compare with anymore?

Macroevolution still doesn't exist as anything but a language term humans use to sort things, it doesn't just happen in the natural world. You are literally asking for a fish to one day grow legs and lungs and then crawl out of the sea or even an amoeba colony to just suddenly become an elephant.

20 million years, in which at least 20 different phyla were supposed to appear. More on that in a second.

Thank you for pointing out the hybrid not being the same thing. Now you've not only got a lack of evidence for recent new families, you've got no evidence for recent evolutionary speciation! Going back to the 20 phyla over 20M years, since there doesn't seem to be an accessible estimate of the number of species produced, I gave it a low estimate of 4,860 species assuming every level of the taxonomic tree below the phylum had 3 branches. (This seems a reasonable minimum as the difference between phyla is too big to happen suddenly; there must have been a lot of steps. I would not be surprised if there were far more species during this time.) That means either there was one new species every constant period of time, putting one every 4115 years, or there were clusters, shrinking that time considerably. Again, it's likely there were more species produced, and 20 is the lowest estimate of phyla that I've seen; there were likely more, again producing more species. This puts that 4115 figure as a maximum. Given this short timeframe which must have happened, why can't a noticeable event have happened once over human history, regardless how much time went into it before? Again, it looks like large-scale evolution just stopped.

A transitional species would be difficult to classify as one species or the other, especially useful as a definition when looking at less clear-cut groups above the species level. Where are the things we can't tell what family it's in? Could be a cat (felidae) or something else entirely, depending what angle you look at it? Evolution requires that at some point these should exist. Why can't something have evolved to be half-way in between two modern families? Or what about repeat evolution? Does one kind of organism evolve into another, and suddenly there's an evolutionary blacklist that prevents it from happening again?

I'm literally asking for proof that one kind of creature can become another kind entirely. I never said sudden. Macroevolution is the sum result of a lot of microevolutionary processes. I would not expect it to happen suddenly (though evolution itself seems to expect it - according to Stephen J. Gould, "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design … has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution" (https://creation.com/cambrian-explosion, ref Gould, Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?, Paleobiology)). Macroevolution can only be a necessary result of microevolutionary processes if you believe that relationship is possible in the first place. Simply put, there is far less evidence than there should be that this scale of evolution is possible.

Here's a question: How does an organism evolve from one cell to thousands, with no in-between? Where are the hundred-celled organisms? I don't think it's reasonable to assume such a massive leap in cell count is possible. Yet it must have happened to reach modern complexity.

Speaking of cells, how did the complexity of the first one arise? You can get amino acids, you can even get proteins with a ton of time and luck, and some kind of mechanism for them to put themselves together. Congratulations, you have a clump of matter sitting there being useless. You still have to get RNA from somewhere. You still have to get the outer walls of a cell from somewhere. You still have to put it together in a non-destructive manner. And you have to jumpstart the impossibly complex system without obliterating it. Keep in mind what it would take to get here, and at this level you can't have a viable system without all the pieces. Don't forget that at no point can these be exposed to oxygen, which must have arose from some reactions within the atmosphere at some point, even if only in trace quantities.

Then you have to account for how the effectively digital data sequences in the nucleotides came to be, and how specific tRNA is produced to decode them. Where did tRNA come from? It only makes sense in the context of a cell, which provides significant shelter, in turn preventing a lot of the forces which could cause it to move around randomly. How would it just happen to form specific to one codon and one amino acid, and conveniently work in tandem with other objects, also nonsensical except in a cell, to detect that codon from an mRNA molecule and fetch the corresponding acid? Never mind how hopelessly complex proteins are, to require extraordinarily precise codon sequences. This is partially mitigated by the redundancy in how multiple codons can produce the same amino acid - preventing mutations from expressing themselves and killing the organism - but it doesn't counteract the sheer number of acids in a protein. It also creates a significant stabilizing effect on the reproduction process, because of the mutations it renders meaningless. The entire RNA/DNA translation sequence looks like something designed to promote stable self-propagation, and not remotely like something which arose randomly.

The impossibility of the beginning of evolution and the complexity within a cell are probably my biggest issues with the current evolutionary model.

Then skip to the first production of large quantities of oxygen. It must be produced in such quantities that it cleans up the atmosphere without the atmosphere fighting back - that is to say there are no reactions between the oxygen and atmosphere (or anything else really) that result in the oxygen producers being destroyed.

Given the sheer improbabilities and impossibilities involved, it makes far more sense, and takes a lot less faith, to believe something else is responsible for life.

[Krom]

That means either there was one new species every constant period of time, putting one every 4115 years, or there were clusters, shrinking that time considerably.

Does the word "parallel" mean anything to you? The environment changed on a global scale, why does everything have to be serial? The evolutionary pressure was everywhere because of the rising oxygen levels and a new environment was opening up, but just like modern times the surface environment was not uniform. Different mutations and different adaptations could arise at the same time in different locations which featured different environments.

And you are also forgetting the companion to random mutations: There is a reason it is called "Natural Selection". Something that WORKS in a given or especially in a changing environment will succeed over something that does not work or does not work as well. DNA/RNA explains itself, it is really good at self replication and it became the dominant system because other methods or self replication weren't as good so they all went extinct. Natural selection eliminates harmful mutations and defects, it is deliberate, it is calculating. Get it right and the organism succeeds, get it wrong and you likely wont even appear in the fossil record.

[LightWolf]

The events don't have to be serial, they just have to occur within a certain timeframe. I'm merely pointing out a maximum timing between events, not that the events are directly caused by each other. That said, parallelism is much more related to the 'cluster' thing I mentioned, shrinking the timeframe. If THOUSANDS of events had to happen over a short span, why can't ONE happen recently?

"It works" doesn't explain HOW it got there in the first place. And you can't use genetic mutation to explain the existence of genes. But really, that is how most evolutionists think - "The process survived, therefore evolution is true, and it doesn't matter what got the process started." You can't answer where DNA came from, only that it survived. 'That it survived' does not say anything about where it came from. You take it on pure faith that RNA and its supporting mechanisms (which don't make much sense without everything being there at once btw) can spontaneously come to exist. The only thing proven in a lab from the start of evolution is, given the right conditions that were much more volatile and less controlled in practice, amino acids. I'm saying, no matter how well it may have survived once it was introduced into the system, evolution CANNOT explain the origin of the RNA/DNA system.

Your video does a good job proving bacteria can become bacteria. At what point do those bacteria gain another thousand cells in a single organism? That's never going to happen.

[Krom]

We can trace all DNA back to a single organism which tells us genetically where it originated, there was ONE winner that figured it out and that is all it actually takes when something works as well as DNA/RNA does. There is no fossil record of the exact cell because single cell organisms are rarely fossilized, even multi-cell organisms with soft bodies are rarely fossilized. The fossil record is a puzzle with most of the pieces missing and permanently destroyed. The further back you go and the simpler the organism, the less likely it was ever recorded as a fossil. We have to use DNA/RNA and cellular building blocks to extrapolate backwards because it is all that remains. The life that first built the blocks to make the leap to DNA/RNA is long gone, out competed by the more adaptable DNA/RNA types or perished in an extinction when the environment changed. Modern cells are more complex and can't just grow randomly because they didn't. But the framework that created them is long since extinct, only the faintest remnants remain. Think of it like pouring a concrete foundation, you use forms but once the concrete is set, you take the forms away and at best an imprint remains. Only you are standing around wondering how we made a square rock with metal rods inside... We know it is there because we can see the remnants and imprints of simpler forms (take mitochondria for instance).

And you ask for an example of bacteria evolving into a multi-cell organism... Take this into consideration, they have been running the experiment in that video for 31 years in a deliberately static environment and has reached 75,000 generations in that time. It sounds like a lot, but a lot more can happen if you give it 4 billion years and 9,600,000,000,000 generations in an environment that is always changing and often openly hostile. What that experiment shows is specialization, the evolved strains are clearly superior to the origin strains if you measure their performance in that specific static environment. You can run that experiment forever and probably not even come close to it forming a multi-cellular organism because there is no impetus for it, no selective force that confers an evolutionary advantage to forming up into a multi-cellular organism, it isn't that type of experiment.

The earliest evidence of life in the fossil record is 4 billion years old, but multi-cellular life didn't develop until over 3 billion years later, that should tell you something about why you aren't seeing it pop up spontaneously from colonies of bacteria. You could see it happen if you wiped out all other life on earth and then sat back for a couple billion years to watch, but that is outside the scope of reasonable.

[Krom]

To throw in another analogy, civilization couldn't build a nuclear submarine without first learning how to float down a river on a log. Even though the only thing a nuclear submarine has in common with a log floating in a river is they are both "boats" in the most abject sense.

Modern cells are the nuclear submarines of the evolutionary process and they sank all the logs a billion years ago.

[LightWolf]

You're missing the point. Science has not figured out HOW RNA/DNA got here, only that it has. "It is here, therefore it got here in a consistent manner" does not prove that it got here in a consistent manner. I would also like to point out that, as a result of your presupposition that evolution is true, that you are assuming there was a prior form that used something other than DNA to reach that stage. There has been no proof beside "evolution is true and we need to explain DNA". Evolution stands on that kind of thinking a lot.

I want to point out one quick detail about your concrete analogy - how did the molds get there, in a form that would produce a building (or other concrete-and-metal structure)? As the result of intelligence. Every complex structure has been produced as the result of intelligence. Or perhaps you can show me where billions of years of random processes produced a suburban home or an office building? The best you can do is a cave or outcropping that was later deemed useful as a shelter. Random processes do not produce functional complexity, especially on a biological scale.

For your second analogy, there is still no evidence that anybody ever carved the canoe out of the tree; it is assumed the canoe must have existed because we have nuclear submarines. There has never been a viable hundred-cell organism ever observed, nor has it ever been demonstrated historically. Again, "evolution is true and we need to explain complex organisms". Therefore hundred-cell organisms, which have never been shown to exist, must have existed...right. Saying "Evolution is true, and we have complexity, therefore there was a mechanism to produce complexity from simplicity - oh hey simplicity used that mechanism to produce complexity, proving evolution!" is just a circular argument that gets nowhere. We only have proof of relative simplicity and complexity, but no proof of an in-between. You cannot use evolution to assume the in-between, then say "evolution is true because, through the in-between we deduced using evolution, simplicity became complexity." Also, both canoes and especially nuclear submarines were created through intelligence. You don't see wind and erosion constructing a factory, in turn making it construct a nuclear submarine. You cannot create analogies for biological complexity without referring to an intelligently-created object (unless you excessively simplify the involved complexity), yet you wonder why people think biology is the result of intelligence.

[Krom]

Filling in the blanks is literally the point of theories. You have a theory and use it to make a predictions, you then perform experiments to verify the predictions, the outcome of the experiments lets you refine the theory and make better predictions with it (and predictions can go forward or backward in time). Evolution has been going through this for more then a century and it has only gotten stronger for it. Just because you can't point to a rock and show "here is <A to B> transitional fossil!" doesn't mean such an organism never existed.

Basically its the same thing as in the flat earth thread, show us a model: use intelligent creation theory to make a prediction about the future of life and perform an experiment that validates it and lets you improve upon the theory.

Perhaps your 100 cell organism would be a good subject to create an experiment on... Well, except for reading the replies on this: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-simpl ... r-organism

And the intelligence behind the nuclear submarine analogy is biology itself: Natural Selection. Don't assume nature is stupid, you will get burned (re: covid-19).

[LightWolf]

It's not just a given 'A to B', it's the vast majority of 'A to B'. There is a staggering lack of transitional fossils, which indicate a gradual evolutionary model is unlikely at best. There should be as many transitional fossils as any other random group of fossils, without the vast amount of clear distinctions.

The non-evolutionary model is as lab-testable as the evolutionary model for one kind of creature turning into another: Establish an ecosystem, let nature do its thing for hundreds of millennia, and watch what comes out. There's your lab experiment. Maybe we could import some creatures onto the nearest habitable planet once we have the technology. If macroevolution is true, we should see brand new creatures. If it isn't, then we won't. We could even fast-track this by using humans as a test creature, and simply observe if humans, over time, become less human in favor of something else - this is much easier to track than any random animal. Under what I've been arguing, where one kind of creature cannot become another kind of creature, I predict that no creature will become another kind of creature in either test case, except maybe as the result of hybrids like the finches I pointed out earlier. Obviously, if macroevolution is true, then you will see creatures gradually become other kinds of creature, or humans slowly become something else.

The only thing I could really gather from the quora thing (other than naming organisms) is that multicellular organisms may have come from colonies, which in turns requires a lot of simultaneous cooperation - you can't just have half the cells in a colony decide to become one organism and expect the others to just go along with it (they will either be forced in, creating a self-incompatible organism, or kicked out/unable to survive), and having half the cells decide that at close enough to the same time is unlikely anyway. Plus, why isn't there any evidence hundred-cell colonies tried it, or are trying it?

"Biology itself" is not an intelligent agent. Not to say it is stupid, as stupidity is a property of intelligence. Nature lacks any intelligence whatsoever; it only operates on randomness. Natural selection is a mechanism, not an agent; not intelligence. Intelligence operates with a goal. Random evolution does not have a goal; it simply happens, with a convenient trend ensuing. Every known instance of complexity is the result of an intelligent agent, not random processes.

[Krom]

Random evolution does not have a goal

Wrong, life and evolution have always had a very real and obvious goal: To continue living.

Did you even read through the quora answers?

If you had read the various discussions about basic multicellular life in the quora link, perhaps you would have noted there are living multicellular organisms with as little as 9 to 41 cells, some worms with 1000 cells as mature adults, etc. Right in your face for your "100 cell organism" thing. I'm not a biologist and I still found them in a matter of seconds once I put a keyboard to google (but I am a old computer nerd, so maybe I'm just better at google than you?).

Also one problem with your non-evolutionary lab test, someone has already done your experiment in small scale and shown conclusively that your prediction based on intelligent creation is false. See:
1
2

[LightWolf]

Living creatures have the goal to continue living. It either does or does not have the means. Evolution does not have a goal; it is just a mechanism. Technically, it's just random mutations surviving longer than other random mutations. At no point do the organisms play an active role in whether or not its genes mutate (except maybe in niche circumstances far too infrequent to explain evolution), meaning anything which has a goal is completely removed from the evolutionary mechanism in this context. Evolution doesn't know what it wants, it just does stuff. Things happen randomly.

To illustrate, here's an experiment: Let's say I set up a 16-slot bracket. Each slot represents a roll of 10 dice with some number of sides. The dice come from a jar, which contains dice with numerous different sides. To start, 10 dice are pulled from the jar, rolled, and set aside. Repeat for the other 15 slots. The winner of each round is the higher roll. Now, I replace one die in each winning lot with another randomly chosen die. I repeat until there is a grand winner. At what point was the experiment itself intelligent? What if I were to add in more factors, say changes in the number of dice, the amount of dice changed, etc? Would that make the experiment intelligent? The only intelligence is me, the designer, intentionally doing this. The experiment is just a mechanism, doing what it does. Now, you might notice I play the role of the (artificial) selector in this case. Does that make natural selection intelligent? Only if you assume there's something inherent in higher rolls that makes them more valuable, just as conventional artificial selection sees desirable traits that are only valuable in the eyes of the selector. How does natural selection know that life is desirable? It doesn't. Life has intrinsic value in this case, as if something ceases to live then it cannot continue no matter what. It is the goal of life, not natural selection, to continue living. As I mentioned earlier, life has no say in the evolutionary process (except to test fitness once the process is complete in a given instance); it only does what it can to preserve its own life.

Are you referring to the related answers in the quora link that appear after only two answers? I'm pretty sure those are different for everyone. You might want to try linking to the specific one you're referring to. My google results said "there's a 4-celled thing, but whether it's actually a single organism is up for debate; beyond that, it's a few thousand." I will admit that Google refuses to cooperate more often than it cooperates.

I will grant that experiment 2 demonstrates cells can form simple multicellular organisms. (Experiment 1 only shows that algae can huddle up, and the groups never reproduced into new groups; you can't even tell if they reproduced at all or just into single cells. Every group formed independently of the others.) Honestly that's why I mainly discussed organisms complex enough for sexual reproduction in my discussion on kinds becoming other kinds - if you withdraw to the single-cell level, cells may decide to work together to form small groups, and 'remember' that decision. It still doesn't demonstrate that kinds of creature can become other kinds of creature fulfilling vastly different roles. Experiment 2 also only discussed division of labor (critical to complex multicellular organisms) in the context of 'some cells die earlier than others to promote reproduction' - it didn't do much with the formation of complex, multi-tissue, multi-function organisms. Each multicellular organism acted like the multicellular equivalent of a single-cell organism.

In any case, these still don't answer the key questions of the beginning of evolution and intracellular complexity, which are the crux of why I don't think evolution works. The history of cell research has only increased its complexity, never reaching a point where random processes in a volatile environment could have reasonably produced it, even given sufficient time. As you have demonstrated, the best you have for much of that is "Well, it did." I haven't even seen a hypothesis for a lot the individual parts. The problem becomes exponentially worse once you consider the codependency that cannot be explained away like it is with i.e. the complexity of an eye (What good is half a tRNA or a 7-nucleotide sequence?). Even the simplest cells require 125,000 nucleotides with a host, 500,000 in a specialized environment, or 1.7 million without either - how do you get all that all at once in a volatile environment? Any less, and it is worthless. The system as a whole does, however, look an awful lot like something designed.

[Top Gun]

My dude, I have not taken a biology class since AP in senior year of high school, and even what little I remember from that is enough to tell me that you have some serious fundamental misunderstandings about the concept of evolution. You keep making incorrect assertions that have been debunked long ago (I mean, transitional fossils galore!), and most of argument seems to consist of, "I don't understand how this could have possibly happened, therefore it didn't." You're also conflating issues that are entirely separate from the question of evolution via natural selection. like the results of the Miller-Urey experiment. Is how complex organic chemicals arose on the primordial Earth an important open question? Absolutely! Is it under the umbrella of evolution via natural selection? Not really.

What really sticks out to me, though, is this statement:

Given the sheer improbabilities and impossibilities involved, it makes far more sense, and takes a lot less faith, to believe something else is responsible for life.

Creationism is solely based on faith. It is not a scientific framework, it does not make testable predictions, and it has no interest in acknowledging evidence that disproves it. It is a complete reduction to "A wizard did it."

[Jeff250]

Also how would you tell if some species is in a transitional state?

Every species is in a transitional state unless it is extinct.

Where are the things we can't tell what family it's in? Could be a cat (felidae) or something else entirely, depending what angle you look at it? Evolution requires that at some point these should exist. Why can't something have evolved to be half-way in between two modern families?

Can you be clear what are the exact criteria for the example you're looking for? For instance, if you are just looking for edge cases, in our (my, at least) lifetime, the skunk has been reclassified from one family to another. Just by using the words "kingdom", "family", "species", etc., you are already giving the game away. These taxonomic classifications are predicted by and exist because of evolution. Creationism does not predict that such a taxonomy should exist, and every new life form that fits into this taxonomy further confirms evolution, not creation.

Or what about repeat evolution? Does one kind of organism evolve into another, and suddenly there's an evolutionary blacklist that prevents it from happening again?

This is called "convergent evolution", and the evolution of the eyeball might be the most famous example of it among a host of others. I wouldn't expect an identical species to evolve twice because of the high dimensionality of the genetic space that evolution is exploring, but it wouldn't be a priori impossible.

[Jeff250]

Given the sheer improbabilities and impossibilities involved, it makes far more sense, and takes a lot less faith, to believe something else is responsible for life.

No, because, even by your own metric, your theory is worse. You seem to have trouble imagining how, given enough time, somewhere in the universe, in a pool of organic molecules somewhere, something as simple as a self-replicating amino acid could have arisen by chance. But then in your theory, we are expected to believe that a being, a deity no less, with at least human-like complexity has arisen by chance. It's good that you're averse to unexplained complexity because scientists are too. But your theory just has so much more of that.

[LightWolf]

Can you be clear what are the exact criteria for the example you're looking for? For instance, if you are just looking for edge cases, in our (my, at least) lifetime, the skunk has been reclassified from one family to another. Just by using the words "kingdom", "family", "species", etc., you are already giving the game away. These taxonomic classifications are predicted by and exist because of evolution. Creationism does not predict that such a taxonomy should exist, and every new life form that fits into this taxonomy further confirms evolution, not creation.

If there's only edge cases, then it shows the theory is non-comprehensive. I'm saying the lines should be blurred a lot more frequently. Also, how do you know creationism doesn't lend to a taxonomy? There's nothing inherent about evolution that says "there are varying levels of similarity and difference" that excludes creation. Taxonomy is just a human-defined set of labels designed to differentiate the various levels of difference. Creation is perfectly fine with "that thing looks more like a bear than that cat".

This is called "convergent evolution", and the evolution of the eyeball might be the most famous example of it among a host of others. I wouldn't expect an identical species to evolve twice because of the high dimensionality of the genetic space that evolution is exploring, but it wouldn't be a priori impossible.

I wasn't limiting to eyeball-complexity structures. There doesn't seem to be a huge pattern of things evolving several times.

...and most of argument seems to consist of, "I don't understand how this could have possibly happened, therefore it didn't." You're also conflating issues that are entirely separate from the question of evolution via natural selection. like the results of the Miller-Urey experiment. Is how complex organic chemicals arose on the primordial Earth an important open question? Absolutely! Is it under the umbrella of evolution via natural selection? Not really.

Without those first chemicals, evolution cannot happen, as there's nothing to evolve. Also, the point isn't that 'I don't understand how this could have possibly happened', the point is that I haven't even seen so much as a hypothesis for much of it - science doesn't understand how it could have possibly happened. At best they can create some of the individual pieces that make no sense without fitting together. They just take it on faith that it did. Also, you're operating on "hey look at this thing that basically can't happen, it happened, so there!"

No, because, even by your own metric, your theory is worse...But then in your theory, we are expected to believe that a being, a deity no less, with at least human-like complexity has arisen by chance. It's good that you're averse to unexplained complexity because scientists are too. But your theory just has so much more of that.

Creationism is solely based on faith.

False assumption 1: "At least human-like complexity." What says this has to be true? It is only true if you assume God fits within the natural box, and I dare you to find a believer that does not believe God is supernatural. Actually, as it turns out, God is quite simple.
False assumption 2: "Arisen by chance." No Christian - or believer in any god for that matter, except maybe a few edge cases - believes this. You've clearly never heard of 'necessary being' before. Two important criteria are that a) it didn't have a beginning, and b) it is unchanging. (Technically a is an extension of b.) Also, you're assuming God fits within time, which is not a property of the supernatural. You're also assuming God has a cause, which violates those two necessary being criteria. In short, you're again assuming God fits within the natural box, which he - being supernatural - does not.
It also turns out that the 'natural being' concept explains why God must be simple, as complexity results in change.

Actually, it's not hard to prove that God both exists and is intelligent:

Either the universe began, fits 'necessary being', or it existed for an infinite period of time. If it existed for an infinite period of time, entropy dictates there won't be any usable energy left. (Also see Hilbert's Hotel and the paradoxes it brings.) If it were necessary, then why would it change so much? No matter what model you subscribe to, you either assume it's infinite, or it had some form of first moment (i.e. big bang) which is an obvious change. Since it's not infinite and not necessary, it must have began.

Beginning is always an effect, as beginning is a change. The law of cause and effect states that every effect must have a cause, so something must have caused it to begin.

Okay, what made it begin? (Think 'what caused the big bang?' Got something? What caused that?) You can't ultimately appeal to a physical process because the universe doesn't exist yet. Therefore something outside the natural box - something supernatural - must have caused it.

Okay, maybe there's some supernatural causal chain that led to the universe. That leaves you in the same problem of 'what started that chain?'

You may have heard the arguments against free will. These basically boil down to "everything you do is just the effect of a cause" - some chemical process led you to do the thing you did. Free will means the ability to cause an effect, without that cause itself being an effect. Therefore, whatever started the first causal chain must have free will, as there was nothing to cause this. In order to have free will, an entity must possess intelligence. Otherwise, it can only act when it is acted upon - everything it does is just the effect of a cause - meaning it doesn't have free will.

Since the universe had a beginning, something supernatural must have caused it. Since this supernatural entity must have acted to start it (or start the chain that led to it), and since this means this action cannot itself be caused, the entity must be intelligent. This entity must be God.

Since the universe exists, God must exist.

The only faith in this proof is that the universe exists and that both physics and logic are, were, and always will be valid.

Speaking of logic, how do you get something as universal as logic out of a chemical soup? Can you show me a gram, or maybe a few joules of it? No? Then clearly it's not an inherent property of the material universe. If the material is all that exists, logic cannot exist. Therefore, logic must have come from outside the material universe. To assume otherwise is not only faith, it is blind faith.

[Jeff250]

If there's only edge cases, then it shows the theory is non-comprehensive. I'm saying the lines should be blurred a lot more frequently.

Weren't you asking for edge cases? I asked if you could be "clear what are the exact criteria for the example you're looking for", and your response is even more vague than what you started with. How are you measuring how close one species is to one family versus another? For instance, for all I know, all species fit your criteria (and somewhat suspect that they do). If you're going to demand that someone show you something, you need to be clear on how we could both unambiguously agree on it being an example of what you're asking for.

Also, how do you know creationism doesn't lend to a taxonomy? There's nothing inherent about evolution that says "there are varying levels of similarity and difference" that excludes creation. Taxonomy is just a human-defined set of labels designed to differentiate the various levels of difference. Creation is perfectly fine with "that thing looks more like a bear than that cat".

The taxonomy of kingdom, family, species, etc. is possible because life evolved according to a phylogeny. Creation doesn't predict a phylogeny. I never said that creation is *incompatible* with a phylogeny--I said that it does not *predict* one, primarily because it predicts little to nothing. This is the difference between science and pseudoscience.

I wasn't limiting to eyeball-complexity structures. There doesn't seem to be a huge pattern of things evolving several times.

Nor would anyone expect there to be.

False assumption 1: "At least human-like complexity." What says this has to be true? It is only true if you assume God fits within the natural box, and I dare you to find a believer that does not believe God is supernatural. Actually, as it turns out, God is quite simple.
False assumption 2: "Arisen by chance." No Christian - or believer in any god for that matter, except maybe a few edge cases - believes this. You've clearly never heard of 'necessary being' before. Two important criteria are that a) it didn't have a beginning, and b) it is unchanging.

Most of this is just semantic gymnastics. Whether you like the phrase "arisen by chance", whether something has a beginning or not, whether something is unchanging, it doesn't matter. Why is it that it is your god that has always existed and not an unchanging balloon or an immortal couch cushion or nothing at all? That's the probability space that I'm referring to when I talk about chance. If you don't like the word "arisen" then you can use a different one, and the fact that you claim your god didn't have a beginning and is unchanging is irrelevant.

You've clearly never heard of 'necessary being' before.

I'm familiar with the Ontological Argument, but you should also be aware of Kant's well known rebuttal--that existence is not a property. To put it in programming terms, whether or not an instance of a class exists (i.e., whether an object of that class has ever been instantiated) is not a property (field, etc.) of that class. There is no class that, by its definition, must have been instantiated.

Actually, as it turns out, God is quite simple.

I'm doubting even you think this. Do you think that God has a personality? Do you think that God has creativity? Imagine the amount of code that it would take to encode someone's personality and creativity.

Even if you think that God is a necessary being, was it necessary that God created the earth with elephants? He couldn't have rearranged the continents a little differently? I doubt even you think that the Ontological Argument requires those things, and if you have different possibilities, then you have information, and if you have information, then you have complexity.

In short, you're again assuming God fits within the natural box, which he - being supernatural - does not.

You have to be careful here. If I use something like information or Kolmogorov complexity as my metric for complexity, then that is something that is neither natural nor supernatural--it's purely in the world of logic.

On the other hand, when you say that God is simple, what metric of complexity are you using? Is there one? How complex is something else other than God according to this metric?

Beginning is always an effect, as beginning is a change. The law of cause and effect states that every effect must have a cause, so something must have caused it to begin.

Okay, what made it begin? (Think 'what caused the big bang?' Got something? What caused that?) You can't ultimately appeal to a physical process because the universe doesn't exist yet. Therefore something outside the natural box - something supernatural - must have caused it.

You have to be careful here. There is no "law of cause and effect", and, in fact, cause and effect is a very debated concept. For instance, as Hume argued, there is no a priori reason to believe in cause and effect, nor is there a way to measure it empirically, because any such attempt at empirical measurement would be implicitly assuming cause and effect's existence. Kant attempted to salvage the concept by arguing that cause and effect is a necessary condition of human's experience of the universe. Others have argued other things. Regardless of what you or I think of it, it probably doesn't make sense to apply cause and effect *outside* of the universe, even if we as humans are so comfortable with applying it to our understanding of our experience of it.

With that said, I wouldn't want to completely invalidate the wonder of why our universe is the way that it is, whatever you want to call that. But again, your cure is worse than the so-called disease. The universe is pretty simple. It's a few #define's (universal constants), and a handful of simple functions (physical laws, which physicists are busy further simplifying). In terms of matter, the initial state of the universe was random, so if you're looking for complexity you're not even going to find any there. God, on the other hand, is insanely complex. You can argue "supernatural so doesn't count", but supernatural is just a word that seems to do little to brush away the problem.

[LightWolf]

Weren't you asking for edge cases? I asked if you could be "clear what are the exact criteria for the example you're looking for", and your response is even more vague than what you started with. How are you measuring how close one species is to one family versus another? For instance, for all I know, all species fit your criteria (and somewhat suspect that they do). If you're going to demand that someone show you something, you need to be clear on how we could both unambiguously agree on it being an example of what you're asking for.

Let me put it this way: Your 'edge cases', such as the skunk example, should be happening with high frequency. They should be so normal that you can't call them edge cases.

The taxonomy of kingdom, family, species, etc. is possible because life evolved according to a phylogeny. Creation doesn't predict a phylogeny. I never said that creation is *incompatible* with a phylogeny--I said that it does not *predict* one, primarily because it predicts little to nothing. This is the difference between science and pseudoscience.

I could talk about historical vs operational science, but here's something to consider: Creation predicts the possibility of miracles, such as healings. I, along with many others, have witnessed such things, and heard within-one-generation stories of many others, as well as being a primary basis of the growth of the Chinese church among others. I know your methodological naturalism explicitly excludes such things, but if you don't limit science to that one method, creation can predict a lot.

Actually, that's a big problem here - science run on the idea that God doesn't exist tends to conclude that God doesn't exist.

I wasn't limiting to eyeball-complexity structures. There doesn't seem to be a huge pattern of things evolving several times.

Nor would anyone expect there to be.

Surely, given how many millions of years?, there must have been some simpler-than-an-eyeball re-evolution.

Most of this is just semantic gymnastics. Whether you like the phrase "arisen by chance", whether something has a beginning or not, whether something is unchanging, it doesn't matter. Why is it that it is your god that has always existed and not an unchanging balloon or an immortal couch cushion or nothing at all? That's the probability space that I'm referring to when I talk about chance. If you don't like the word "arisen" then you can use a different one, and the fact that you claim your god didn't have a beginning and is unchanging is irrelevant.

Your 'semantic gymnastics' includes a lot of redefining with a pinch of bait-and-switch. What do you mean when you say life arose by chance? Through a series of unrelated and unpredictable processes, life began where there was none. Same when you say the big bang happened by chance, and when just about anything else arises by chance. What do you mean when you say God arose by chance? ...what do you mean? Definitely not that a series of unrelated and unpredictable processes led to God.

I'm familiar with the Ontological Argument, but you should also be aware of Kant's well known rebuttal--that existence is not a property. To put it in programming terms, whether or not an instance of a class exists (i.e., whether an object of that class has ever been instantiated) is not a property (field, etc.) of that class. There is no class that, by its definition, must have been instantiated.

I only used the term because that's the label I've heard everywhere, but I did not mean it in the sense that these properties define an object which must exist, only that they define an object which can exist uncaused. Not all hypothetical 'necessary beings' exist, however we cannot get to where we are unless one does. Also worth pointing out that I'm not relying on the ontological argument here, even if I do reference some of its terminology.

Also fwiw static classes exist.

I'm doubting even you think this. Do you think that God has a personality? Do you think that God has creativity? Imagine the amount of code that it would take to encode someone's personality and creativity.

Even if you think that God is a necessary being, was it necessary that God created the earth with elephants? He couldn't have rearranged the continents a little differently? I doubt even you think that the Ontological Argument requires those things, and if you have different possibilities, then you have information, and if you have information, then you have complexity.

More bait-and-switch semantics, this time with complexity. We had been debating complexity in the sense of co-dependent moving parts, and you throw in some abstract concepts. That said, where do abstract concepts like creativity come from?

Also here's a question - if you look at sensical information, what is the only known source? I'm defining sensical information here as information which makes sense through a given interpretive process. The only known source of sensical information and its related interpretive processes (if you exclude evolution as it's what we're debating) is intelligence.

You have to be careful here. If I use something like information or Kolmogorov complexity as my metric for complexity, then that is something that is neither natural nor supernatural--it's purely in the world of logic.

On the other hand, when you say that God is simple, what metric of complexity are you using? Is there one? How complex is something else other than God according to this metric?

I still love how, after debating biological complexity based on co-dependent moving parts, you run to information theory for a convenient definition.

When I think of God, I think of a person possessing certain attributes. These attributes are both abstract and irreducible. Compare to a cell. It has organelles running to and fro, decoding DNA (which is sensical information by the above definition btw), with highly specialized and internally complex systems (things like the flagellum motor) while other systems protect it. Machines within machines, making sure machines work properly. All of this relies on precise chemical configurations, in turn reliant on precise subatomic configurations. All of this is so complex that it can break down fairly easily (the vast majority of genetic mutation, radiation effects, etc) - to the point where redundancy had to be built in. Break almost any sub-component, and the component is worthless, sometimes taking the whole cell with it. Cells are hopelessly complex. God is a person with attributes. God as a person does not rely on anything else for his existence. These attributes do not rely on anything else for their existence. Simple.

Also, you still cannot account for how the 'world of logic' can exist in a purely material system.

You have to be careful here. There is no "law of cause and effect", and, in fact, cause and effect is a very debated concept. For instance, as Hume argued, there is no a priori reason to believe in cause and effect, nor is there a way to measure it empirically, because any such attempt at empirical measurement would be implicitly assuming cause and effect's existence. Kant attempted to salvage the concept by arguing that cause and effect is a necessary condition of human's experience of the universe. Others have argued other things. Regardless of what you or I think of it, it probably doesn't make sense to apply cause and effect *outside* of the universe, even if we as humans are so comfortable with applying it to our understanding of our experience of it.

If you deny cause and effect, you deny science, as science is founded on cause and effect. You also deny uniformity of nature (another thing which can't be taken as a constant anyway in a purely material system), in turn again denying science through a foundational principle. But let me pose this question: Why wouldn't cause and effect exist outside the natural universe? What would take its place as the reason things happen? Something has to; as I already argued, the universe came from somewhere. You could replace it with actions of free will, a property of intelligence, a property of a person, almost by definition God in this context.

With that said, I wouldn't want to completely invalidate the wonder of why our universe is the way that it is, whatever you want to call that. But again, your cure is worse than the so-called disease. The universe is pretty simple. It's a few #define's (universal constants), and a handful of simple functions (physical laws, which physicists are busy further simplifying). In terms of matter, the initial state of the universe was random, so if you're looking for complexity you're not even going to find any there. God, on the other hand, is insanely complex. You can argue "supernatural so doesn't count", but supernatural is just a word that seems to do little to brush away the problem.

Ignoring the comment about God's complexity (I already explained why twice; it's the same bait-and-switch), who defined the constants? People have even calculated what would happen if they were different, so there's no inherent reason why they are what they are. How did they get defined the way they are? Perhaps because someone wrote the code? (You're relying on yet another analogy to intelligent design to explain why we weren't intelligently designed btw.) While I'm here, I can guarantee "Because it is" is not a better solution than a reason why it is.

Also, according to your own links, the initial state of the universe was a bunch of random information, exponentially increasing the complexity. Did you even read how a gibberish string is more complex than 'ababababab', or, say, a random universe is more complex than universe of planets, stars, and other objects? Your own standard of complexity says that a random universe is the most complex thing imaginable.

[Krom]

You keep coming back to "Modern cells/DNA are too complex to have evolved naturally." and we keep pointing out you can iterate a lot of complexity in to something from a very simple origin when you do it for 4 billion years. Modern cells weren't built in a day, and not all modern cells are equally complex even!

Let me bring up Covid-19 again; the Omicron variant is 5 times more transmissible as the Delta variant which itself was 3 times more transmissible than the original strain. So in 18 months the virus has evolved to be 15 times more transmissible than it started out as, this is extremely potent evidence of evolution and natural selection in action. Not only did the virus change, but it changed in a way that was significantly beneficial to itself and it did it twice.

Which also brings us to your issue with random mutations. You say there is no way random mutation can explain so many beneficial changes, but pretty much nothing in nature is random which we keep pointing out with natural selection. In nature "random mutation" has the effect over time of basically trying every possible permutation of something and natural selection then picks only the better ones to keep going. Covid-19 did this twice, a stronger version took over, only to be replaced by yet another even stronger version, and it will probably happen again! Basically right now covid-19 is randomly mutating in every actively infected host but starting with an already 15 times improved version and natural selection will filter out any bad or defective mutations from there that don't make it any better, looking for the one that makes it 30 times improved from the original.

Random mutation is you throw ★■◆● at the wall till something sticks, only then natural selection comes in to play and it very much ceases to be random. Because natural selection sweeps away all the stuff that didn't stick, then makes a whole bunch of exact copies of what did and then starts tweaking a copy here and there with changes to see what sticks even better. If a tweak doesn't work or makes it less sticky, the first improved sticky version will still win out, but if a tweak adds even more extra glue and makes it stick even easier then that version takes over, gets copied a whole bunch and the tweaking process starts over again.

[Jeff250]

Let me put it this way: Your 'edge cases', such as the skunk example, should be happening with high frequency. They should be so normal that you can't call them edge cases.

It's an edge case in that it is exactly what you were asking for -- a species on the edge of another family, not an edge case because it is uncommon. How do you know that every species doesn't fit your definition? You refuse to provide any way for someone to know if a species fits your criteria or not. You are hoping that we will find your own vagueness and ambiguity convincing of your argument.

I know your methodological naturalism explicitly excludes such things, but if you don't limit science to that one method, creation can predict a lot.

I don't preclude the supernatural from science. My only methodology is the scientific method, and, when there's a tie, to prefer the simpler explanation (Occam's Razor). I find the phenomenon of miracles fascinating, and I enjoy hearing stories about them, but, aside from plenty of anecdotes, there isn't much in terms of scientific evidence for the existence of miracles. For instance, if you believed in the healing power of prayer, you could design a double-blind trial where, unbeknownst to the patients, you have a cleric pray for 200 of them and not pray for the other 200. You then compare their outcomes using a t-test or some other statistical test. That's a 100% legitimate scientific experiment for testing the supernatural that I would absolutely be convinced by the outcome of. However, I imagine that, before we even perform the test, *you*'ll be the one providing excuses for why it won't work, and *you*'ll be the one arguing why the supernatural must be excluded from science ("the Lord works in mysterious ways", "don't test the Lord your God", etc.). Science has no limitations in discovering the supernatural outside of such excuses for why it never does.

Surely, given how many millions of years?, there must have been some simpler-than-an-eyeball re-evolution.

You wouldn't find entire species evolving more than once due to the combinatorics of it. It's like shuffling a deck of cards exactly the same way twice. It doesn't mean that shuffling a deck of cards is impossible. It doesn't mean that, if you shuffle a deck of cards a certain way, then, given the extreme unlikelihood of shuffling a deck of cards exactly the way you did, then you couldn't have shuffled it that way. It does mean that you aren't going to shuffle the deck the same way twice.

Evolution has something going for it in that, sometimes, the same evolutionary pressures occur at different places and/or times. There are multiple lists of examples of this phenomenon here.

What do you mean when you say life arose by chance? Through a series of unrelated and unpredictable processes, life began where there was none. Same when you say the big bang happened by chance, and when just about anything else arises by chance. What do you mean when you say God arose by chance? ...what do you mean? Definitely not that a series of unrelated and unpredictable processes led to God.

When I say that self-replicating amino acids arose by chance, I mean that you would need a lot of planets over a lot of time before seeing it happen once. To my knowledge, I never said that the big bang arose by chance. Your question about what do I mean about the probability that God arose by chance is fair. We can ask why is it that God (Jehovah) has always existed and not Allah. We can ask why is it that God has always existed and not the Greek pantheon. We can ask why is it that God has always existed and not a balloon or some inanimate object. We can ask why is it that God has always existed and not a multiverse. If God created the universe, then we seem to be lucky compared to almost all of the other possibilities (balloon, couch cushion, table, chair, a grain of sand, a single proton, etc.), as virtually all of the other imaginable possibilities were either not this universe nor could have created this universe.

More bait-and-switch semantics, this time with complexity. We had been debating complexity in the sense of co-dependent moving parts

What definition of complexity (the lots of moving parts one) are you using? It's not like I don't acknowledge that there are different measures of complexity, but I don't know what measure this is that you're referring to. In any case, you now know the two that I find compelling: Shannon Information and Kolmogorov complexity. I still don't know what you're using though or why you think we should prefer it other than "lots of moving parts".

I still love how, after debating biological complexity based on co-dependent moving parts, you run to information theory for a convenient definition.

All of those moving parts are encoded in genes, which are composed of by a base-4 alphabet. Although as I point out below, such an encoding isn't necessary to apply information theory, such an encoding does make it easier to apply information theory and hopefully more obvious how it is applicable.

When I think of God, I think of a person possessing certain attributes. These attributes are both abstract and irreducible. Compare to a cell. It has organelles running to and fro, decoding DNA (which is sensical information by the above definition btw), with highly specialized and internally complex systems (things like the flagellum motor) while other systems protect it. Machines within machines, making sure machines work properly. All of this relies on precise chemical configurations, in turn reliant on precise subatomic configurations. All of this is so complex that it can break down fairly easily (the vast majority of genetic mutation, radiation effects, etc) - to the point where redundancy had to be built in. Break almost any sub-component, and the component is worthless, sometimes taking the whole cell with it. Cells are hopelessly complex. God is a person with attributes. God as a person does not rely on anything else for his existence. These attributes do not rely on anything else for their existence. Simple.

Information arises when you have different possibilities and you learn something about them such as that one of those possibilities is the case. It can be thought of as a measure of surprise. It can be measured in bits and often is encoded in something like bits. For instance, if you watch a high def movie with lots of twists and turns and varying scenes, you know that the underlying MP4 must take up a large amount of space, no matter how good the compression is. There is so much information there. But, if you know that it is sunny in Seattle, you also have information, even though weather has no simple encoding. I think it makes sense to think of God in this way, why God and not Zeus, why God wanted elephants and not unicorns, etc., even if we don't know if God is encoded in bits, DNA, or what else. How much space in the Bible is attempting to describe God, and how far does it even get? The authors of the Bible believed that all of those descriptions are necessary because there are so many other ways that could have been.

edit: In retrospect, if I want to make this argument, I should have invoked the informational theoretic concept of entropy, i.e., the concept of God has a lot of entropy because of how many possible gods there are.

If you deny cause and effect, you deny science, as science is founded on cause and effect. You also deny uniformity of nature (another thing which can't be taken as a constant anyway in a purely material system), in turn again denying science through a foundational principle.

Interestingly, you can still do science just as easily even if it turns out that cause and effect is just something the brain imposes on its experience of the universe. Science was never supposed to be metaphysics. I agree though that this would be a rather disappointing outcome.

But let me pose this question: Why wouldn't cause and effect exist outside the natural universe? What would take its place as the reason things happen? Something has to; as I already argued, the universe came from somewhere. You could replace it with actions of free will, a property of intelligence, a property of a person, almost by definition God in this context.

Not sure. Maybe nothing? Or maybe it really was cause and effect after all? Or maybe it doesn't even make sense to ask what would take its place? Like I said, I don't want to invalidate wondering about why the universe is the way that it is. But, on the other hand, there's no reason to think that cause and effect exists outside of our universe or that our universe had to have a cause.

who defined the constants? People have even calculated what would happen if they were different, so there's no inherent reason why they are what they are. How did they get defined the way they are? Perhaps because someone wrote the code?

I agree that there is unexplained complexity there. Some simply believe that all possibilities exist such as a multiverse. Others just bite the bullet and accept the unexplained complexity in the #define's. I'd rather accept the unexplained complexity of a few #define's just happening to be the way that they are than a personal deity just happening to always be, whose complexity surely exceeds a few #define's.

Also, according to your own links, the initial state of the universe was a bunch of random information, exponentially increasing the complexity. Did you even read how a gibberish string is more complex than 'ababababab', or, say, a random universe is more complex than universe of planets, stars, and other objects? Your own standard of complexity says that a random universe is the most complex thing imaginable.

A random-looking string can have almost no Kolmogorov complexity if you know the seed and the PRNG. You're right though that I shouldn't use the term "random" here but rather seemingly random. The seemingly random initial conditions of the universe, since there is nothing special about them, could have been brought about by something simple, and thus aren't unexplained complexity.

[LightWolf]

You keep coming back to "Modern cells/DNA are too complex to have evolved naturally." and we keep pointing out you can iterate a lot of complexity in to something from a very simple origin when you do it for 4 billion years. Modern cells weren't built in a day, and not all modern cells are equally complex even!

If the parts made any sense in a partial or separate system, I'd be inclined to agree. However, you have to have the core components of a cell evolve at the same time (tRNA doesn't make sense without the entire protein synthesis process in place, which relies on tRNA to operate - you can't have these seperately, and there's nothing you can really shoehorn in tRNA's place), and in many cases each component needs to be in its complete form (good luck with RNA that's missing chunks of its backbone and a handful of scattered nucleotides, also again half-tRNA is useless) - that's the issue.

You say there is no way random mutation can explain so many beneficial changes,

Where did I say that? Your Covid example, which I started this entire debate by conceding to, demonstrates that on a small scale evolution can work like that. I've only ever challenged large-scale evolution.

(Won't quote the rest because it's more of the Covid example and various non-objectional stuff.)

It's an edge case in that it is exactly what you were asking for -- a species on the edge of another family, not an edge case because it is uncommon. How do you know that every species doesn't fit your definition? You refuse to provide any way for someone to know if a species fits your criteria or not. You are hoping that we will find your own vagueness and ambiguity convincing of your argument.

You provided the example of a skunk being reclassified. Congratulations, you found one instance. Show me the pattern. When professional scientists have a hard time deciding what to classify something, then it is what I am looking for. They're the ones setting the standard by how easily they can classify it.

I don't preclude the supernatural from science. My only methodology is the scientific method, and, when there's a tie, to prefer the simpler explanation (Occam's Razor). I find the phenomenon of miracles fascinating, and I enjoy hearing stories about them, but, aside from plenty of anecdotes, there isn't much in terms of scientific evidence for the existence of miracles. For instance, if you believed in the healing power of prayer, you could design a double-blind trial where, unbeknownst to the patients, you have a cleric pray for 200 of them and not pray for the other 200. You then compare their outcomes using a t-test or some other statistical test. That's a 100% legitimate scientific experiment for testing the supernatural that I would absolutely be convinced by the outcome of. However, I imagine that, before we even perform the test, *you*'ll be the one providing excuses for why it won't work, and *you*'ll be the one arguing why the supernatural must be excluded from science ("the Lord works in mysterious ways", "don't test the Lord your God", etc.). Science has no limitations in discovering the supernatural outside of such excuses for why it never does.

Only difficulty is in finding people who would do it. I actually believe this would be a good experiment, if you can find the people. If I had no experience with miracles, then yes I might be making those objections as I would believe in something I don't actually know can happen. However, having this experience, I know the results of this experiment would confirm miracles, so there's no reason to make those objections to defend something I believe in which I would know cannot happen.

If you truly believe that science can prove the supernatural like that, you are in a minority. Enlightenment science was about explaining the world without God, and the modern scientific method was built on this framework. Most people would see your experiment, see that it confirmed miracles, and start analyzing the sound waves of the clerics or something like that, or maybe even write it off as a coincidence, as obviously God cannot be responsible. That would be my only objection, is that the scientific community will not allow a supernatural explanation.

I was talking to some one else, and they pointed out something else that the biblical model predicts - due to the fall where death was introduced, there should be mass extinctions, as has been confirmed. In addition to specific extinction events, you also see that 90% of species have died. As it turns out, the Bible predicts survival of the fittest without requiring they ever undergo drastic change as a result.

You wouldn't find entire species evolving more than once due to the combinatorics of it. It's like shuffling a deck of cards exactly the same way twice. It doesn't mean that shuffling a deck of cards is impossible. It doesn't mean that, if you shuffle a deck of cards a certain way, then, given the extreme unlikelihood of shuffling a deck of cards exactly the way you did, then you couldn't have shuffled it that way. It does mean that you aren't going to shuffle the deck the same way twice.

Evolution has something going for it in that, sometimes, the same evolutionary pressures occur at different places and/or times. There are multiple lists of examples of this phenomenon here.

Fair enough on convergent. That said, your cards example doesn't quite work as well as you think it does (evolution is not a series of independent events); I think my 'dice tournament' works as a better model as it replicates the dependent-probability nature of evolution. In that, there's higher odds of getting the same roll twice, even if it came through a different combination of dice, than a suitably similar card-shuffling model. (If you still want to use cards, then sub in cards from different decks over time. You still need the bracket for the dependent probability.) In any case, you are throwing a lot of time in the mix, so why can't something like this happen at a larger scale given that much time and the sheer number of events occuring?

When I say that self-replicating amino acids arose by chance, I mean that you would need a lot of planets over a lot of time before seeing it happen once. To my knowledge, I never said that the big bang arose by chance.

Okay, I will admit I was going based off standard usage of the terms. Most do not separate chance from random. Most do use it in the same sense for both events.

Your question about what do I mean about the probability that God arose by chance is fair. We can ask why is it that God (Jehovah) has always existed and not Allah. We can ask why is it that God has always existed and not the Greek pantheon. We can ask why is it that God has always existed and not a balloon or some inanimate object. We can ask why is it that God has always existed and not a multiverse. If God created the universe, then we seem to be lucky compared to almost all of the other possibilities (balloon, couch cushion, table, chair, a grain of sand, a single proton, etc.), as virtually all of the other imaginable possibilities were either not this universe nor could have created this universe

The multiverse statement made me think of the Bernard Carr quote, "If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse." It's well-accepted among the scientific community that by the odds alone we shouldn't be here.

If God created the universe, he did not do so at random. He knew what he was creating. He knew he didn't want a balloon or a single proton, but rather our universe. It's not that we were lucky, but that we were intentional. If you want to talk luck, again look at how fine-tuned almost every physical constant (and numerous other phenomena) is to enable us to not only be here but observe the universe. (Did you know Earth is unique in that we can see beyond our local area out into the galaxy and beyond?) That's not luck, that's intention. Unless you want to rely on a poorly-substantiated and completely unproven multiverse, which later comments imply you do not.

As it turns out, there is plenty of reason to believe that Jehovah is the correct God, and Jesus was his son. J. Warner Wallace (Cold-Case Christianity) was an atheist cold case detective who used forensic methods on the gospels. He found them so compelling that he became a Christian. Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ)was an atheist journalist whose wife who had just turned to Christ, and he wanted to prove her wrong. He also became a Christian through his investigation. Josh McDowell of Evidence that Demands a Verdict is another who became a Christian after trying to disprove Christianity. If the evidence were flimsy, they would have taken note and not reversed their core worldview.

What definition of complexity (the lots of moving parts one) are you using? It's not like I don't acknowledge that there are different measures of complexity, but I don't know what measure this is that you're referring to. In any case, you now know the two that I find compelling: Shannon Information and Kolmogorov complexity. I still don't know what you're using though or why you think we should prefer it other than "lots of moving parts"...All of those moving parts are encoded in genes, which are composed of by a base-4 alphabet. Although as I point out below, such an encoding isn't necessary to apply information theory, such an encoding does make it easier to apply information theory and hopefully more obvious how it is applicable.

How about the dictionary definition?

complex: a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts

(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/complex)
This is how most people understand complexity. Granted, that definition is a noun generally used in different contexts, but it sums up quite nicely how people understand complexity, and the best adjective definition is "contains two or more things" anyway.

Without the encoding, the information is nonsense. You need a way to decode it. This is part of why I keep bringing up tRNA - tRNA makes no sense without the encoding scheme (nor does any other decoder), and the encoding scheme doesn't make sense without a decoder. They would need to evolve together. Furthermore, there is no known encoding scheme and decoding mechanism not designed through intelligence.

Information arises when you have different possibilities and you learn something about them such as that one of those possibilities is the case. It can be thought of as a measure of surprise. It can be measured in bits and often is encoded in something like bits. For instance, if you watch a high def movie with lots of twists and turns and varying scenes, you know that the underlying MP4 must take up a large amount of space, no matter how good the compression is. There is so much information there. But, if you know that it is sunny in Seattle, you also have information, even though weather has no simple encoding. I think it makes sense to think of God in this way, why God and not Zeus, why God wanted elephants and not unicorns, etc., even if we don't know if God is encoded in bits, DNA, or what else. How much space in the Bible is attempting to describe God, and how far does it even get? The authors of the Bible believed that all of those descriptions are necessary because there are so many other ways that could have been.

Seattle's weather does not fit the kind of information discussed in biology; the usual discussions of information there - or anywhere really - are about encoded information. Your other example is digital, put there by intelligence. Sensical encoded information results from intelligence.

I already touched on why God and not Zeus. As for why elephants and not unicorns (speaking of which you technically can't prove there weren't unicorns, even though there is very little evidence) - because it's what was deemed necessary. Intention, not luck. No, we don't know how God is encoded (or even if - no known medium to encode in, nor do we even know encoding is necessary, you could go on about the definitions, semantics, and technicalities of what makes encoding, etc).

Interestingly, you can still do science just as easily even if it turns out that cause and effect is just something the brain imposes on its experience of the universe. Science was never supposed to be metaphysics. I agree though that this would be a rather disappointing outcome.

How can science be done as easily if cause and effect do not exist? Science assumes that one thing causes another. If it's just a coincidence, then it can't guarantee i.e. that tomorrow the world will operate under survival of the least fit. Science is about disproving coincidence. If it turns out that cause and effect is just something imposed on its experience, then science itself has been disproven. Also, fun fact, science started as a branch of philosophy, meaning it didn't escape metaphysics that easily, and many metaphysicists have taken jabs at it over the centuries.

Not sure. Maybe nothing? Or maybe it really was cause and effect after all? Or maybe it doesn't even make sense to ask what would take its place? Like I said, I don't want to invalidate wondering about why the universe is the way that it is. But, on the other hand, there's no reason to think that cause and effect exists outside of our universe or that our universe had to have a cause.

If our universe is uncaused, then how did it begin? Also, if cause and effect does not exist in the supernatural and our universe is uncaused, then how is it possible that the rules of the universe haven't ever changed? Why didn't the same...process? can you even call it a process at this point?...that led to the universe change its fundamentals at several points?

I agree that there is unexplained complexity there. Some simply believe that all possibilities exist such as a multiverse. Others just bite the bullet and accept the unexplained complexity in the #define's. I'd rather accept the unexplained complexity of a few #define's just happening to be the way that they are than a personal deity just happening to always be, whose complexity surely exceeds a few #define's.

There must be an explanation for the #define's, or else they wouldn't be there. The definition cannot be natural, as nature relies on those #define's. Therefore something outside nature must have defined them. "Because they are" is never a good explanation. Not to mention that "because they are" does not lend any reason why they never change. There is no reason for the constants to be constant without a supernatural origin. Your preference for no explanation over a supernatural one betrays your bias against the supernatural, and puts you firmly on the side of blind faith, exclusively against the supernatural for that matter (not in anything). The complexity argument is the only thread saving your faith from being irrational; if that gets disproven but you still prefer 'no evidence', then your faith would indeed be irrational.

Mandatory pointing out of the limits of your analogies, #define's are part of code, and code is written by intelligence.

A random-looking string can have almost no Kolmogorov complexity if you know the seed and the PRNG. You're right though that I shouldn't use the term "random" here but rather seemingly random. The seemingly random initial conditions of the universe, since there is nothing special about them, could have been brought about by something simple, and thus aren't unexplained complexity.

Again, where does a pRNG seed come from?

Even so, though you can reduce the complexity by a lot, you cannot eliminate it. There is complexity no matter what. Being the initial state of nature, it cannot have originated from nature. Therefore, yes, it is unexplained (unless, like me, you have an explanation). Also, I can explain "goisweyeugfrkioyus" by smashing my keys in a certain order; that doesn't reduce its complexity very much - a seed mechanism does not inherently reduce the complexity of the universe. Drawing from your pRNG example, you also run into the issue that a seed cannot be less complex than the maximum complexity of the resulting number. An 8-bit RNG algorithm requires an 8-bit seed. Anything less, and it must be cast to 8 bits before it is usable. It also invariably results in a new 8-bit seed for all further operations.

You know, you keep talking about how problematic it is that something complex must be the result of something more complex, making God extraordinarily complex, yet see no problem with evolution resulting in a constant increase in complexity by your own definition. Which is it? Does complexity require higher complexity to form or not? Also worth pointing out that this requirement for higher complexity is based off within-nature observation, again resulting in an assumption contrary to evolution - either nature is violating this law, or it is not actually a law. Since you believe evolution, which requires increasing complexity, there is no reason for you to also believe God must be more complex than his creation. If you assume it came from nothing, the ultimate lack of complexity, then you seriously run afoul of this problem. There is no reason to believe, especially once you involve anything beyond the natural, that complexity can only result from higher complexity. (Hey, isn't that the argument you used on my cause-and-effect logic?)

[Jeff250]

In any case, you are throwing a lot of time in the mix, so why can't something like this happen at a larger scale given that much time and the sheer number of events occuring?

It's not a priori impossible, but I think it would be practically impossible for this reason: although I cannot personally verify this, I believe that even if you look at the examples of convergent evolution, such as the eyeball, you'll find that, even though they are functionally the same, they are genetically quite different. So, while we have examples like the eyeball, when asking if there are convergent species, not only would you be going from part to full organism, but you would also be asking that their genes to be compatible as well.

If God created the universe, he did not do so at random. He knew what he was creating. He knew he didn't want a balloon or a single proton, but rather our universe. It's not that we were lucky, but that we were intentional.

I'm not sure if you're understanding my claim -- I'm not asking why did God create a universe instead of a balloon. I'm asking why is there a God instead of a balloon. If you can imagine an eternal, unchanging, timeless God having existed without a cause, then why not an eternal, unchanging, timeless balloon existing without a cause? It could be that, instead of a God who created our universe, instead of all of that, there's just a balloon, an eternal, unchanging, timeless balloon, and no God, and no universe, and that's it. So why did we get a universe-creating-God instead of a balloon? Or a sock? Or nothing at all? I mean, almost nothing can create universes, right? So why did we end up with our eternal, unchanging, timeless thing being a universe-creating deity? We seem pretty lucky according to your theory. I'll take my chances with my self-replicating amino acids in my pool of organic chemicals.

As it turns out, there is plenty of reason to believe that Jehovah is the correct God, and Jesus was his son.

Again, I'm not asking why do you believe in God/Jehovah instead of Allah. I'm saying, instead of God being Jehovah, God could have been Allah. God could have been Zeus. God could have really liked unicorns and hated elephants. But no. We end up with the elephant-loving one that hated unicorns and that isn't like Allah and isn't like Zeus but is a lot like Jehovah and has so many attributes he has so many of these books in the Bible spending so much space attempting to describe all of his attributes. That's why your god is complex. Because you can imagine so many possible variations but yet we wound up with this very specific one. And most importantly, not a sock.

How about the dictionary definition?

complex: a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts

(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/complex)
This is how most people understand complexity. Granted, that definition is a noun generally used in different contexts, but it sums up quite nicely how people understand complexity, and the best adjective definition is "contains two or more things" anyway.

Now turn that into a metric. You'll probably end up with something resembling Shannon Information or Kolmogorov complexity.

How can science be done as easily if cause and effect do not exist?

Exactly the way it is done now, except with an asterisk saying that science is the study of humans' experience of the universe and not necessarily to the universe itself.

There must be an explanation for the #define's, or else they wouldn't be there. The definition cannot be natural, as nature relies on those #define's. Therefore something outside nature must have defined them. "Because they are" is never a good explanation. Not to mention that "because they are" does not lend any reason why they never change. There is no reason for the constants to be constant without a supernatural origin. Your preference for no explanation over a supernatural one betrays your bias against the supernatural, and puts you firmly on the side of blind faith, exclusively against the supernatural for that matter (not in anything). The complexity argument is the only thread saving your faith from being irrational

Either way, a few #define's or a personal deity, you have unexplained complexity. I'm just choosing the side of radically less unexplained complexity. There's no "because God" escape hatch to this problem.

Again, where does a pRNG seed come from?

Another #define? My point isn't that it's nothing. Just that it's inconsequential.

Even so, though you can reduce the complexity by a lot, you cannot eliminate it. There is complexity no matter what. Being the initial state of nature, it cannot have originated from nature. Therefore, yes, it is unexplained (unless, like me, you have an explanation). Also, I can explain "goisweyeugfrkioyus" by smashing my keys in a certain order; that doesn't reduce its complexity very much - a seed mechanism does not inherently reduce the complexity of the universe. Drawing from your pRNG example, you also run into the issue that a seed cannot be less complex than the maximum complexity of the resulting number. An 8-bit RNG algorithm requires an 8-bit seed. Anything less, and it must be cast to 8 bits before it is usable. It also invariably results in a new 8-bit seed for all further operations.

I don't know what you mean by this, but the Kolmogorov complexity of a long sequence of PRNG-generated numbers is just the number of lines of the PRNG, the seed, and a few lines to print the numbers in a loop. In any case, it's an analogy and not meant to be picked apart.

You know, you keep talking about how problematic it is that something complex must be the result of something more complex

I would never say that. You're the one that believes that everything was created by a complicated personal deity. If you wanted to go the simplest route, you would believe in a personalityless multiverse I suppose.

[Alter-Fox]

@LightWolf, mostly

Just gonna pop in here and point out that this whole discussion looks like a massive illustration of my point from the end of that other thread.
To someone like Krom or others here, or even moreso to the experts who aren't here, but nevertheless actually feel it's worth dedicating their lives to studying it; the amount of evidence in favour of something like evolution seems staggeringly large, and whatever problems there may be look like small details at best -- some of which may already be starting to be explained. To someone like you who prefers to see the world from a different perspective, you see the exact same thing, exhaustively presented to you, and it still doesn't look so big or sure of itself.

Now, right now, I'm not talking about what these arguments are -- while I may express a preference in my wordings, that's only because I'm not a robot -- I'm not interested or willing right now to have my mind changed.
But consider that in order to even have this debate in the first place, you both must have acknowledged to yourself that the other position exists, even if you think it's just in somebody's head. You have to have admitted to yourself on some level that they can see the same physical things you did and come to a different idea by making a different decision on which parts of it are more important.

The point we were debating before was how both these clearly closely-held points of view are based on being presented with a set of evidence and deciding to believe it, and then choosing how to weight other pieces of information based on that decision. As opposed to a conspiracy theory which is based on being presented with a set of evidence and deciding it's a lie -- and then, again, choosing to reject or accept more information based on that decision. This is why made the argument that the conspiracy theorist's brand of worldview is fundamentally irrational. Since we all form our views based on those decisions, and we all have some level of bias towards them, such that two people can see the same information in very different light, the rationality in those points of view could only lie in how that initial decision was made -- was it by accepting information, or by rejecting it?
This is why I say Flat Earth thinking is irrational, even while both these points of view are rational -- the initial decision to believe in the conspiracy is based on seeing what the world really looks like and deciding that must be a lie. And as I demonstrated in the other thread, you can't have the Flat Earth without the conspiracy.
Have I mentioned how much I love psychological philosophy?




Now, if I may make a quick suggestion here, stop talking about "complexity". It's one of those sorts of words that tends to describe itself. In terms of the actual physical universe and objects in it, it can describe a lot of different things in a lot of extremely different ways. If you don't decide on a clear definition, agree to it, and stick to it, you're going to get stuck in a loop saying the same things about it over and over again because each one of you would probably mean something slightly different, even if you were talking about the exact same object.
Especially when it comes to complex things, the thing about complex things is that they're complicated. Which makes them hard to understand, and hard to compare how complex one sort of complex thing is as opposed to how complex an entirely different sort of complex thing is.
And, while I don't mean to insult any of your intelligence, you and I are all laypeople. Professional expert thing-knowers are still struggling to know all the things about how complicated complex things can get. So when your discussion goes anywhere near talk of how complex a complex thing could be, keep in mind that if they only have the barest inkling of an idea, it's quite possible anyone in here talking about complexity has no clue what they're saying. Even if they think they do. Especially if any part of that thought process involves the phrase "but it's perfectly simple".

Especially don't start talking about levels of complexity because the only way you can even know for sure whether a thing belongs in a certain level is if you actually understand exactly how complex every complex thing involved in the discussion you're having actually is. And you don't. And so after that, it would take an incredible feat of luck for you to not be wrong about everything you subsequently say, because that's how probability works when your argument explicitly relies on so many variables you can't even begin to count how many there are.

When you start talking about "complicated", it's quite possible the actual answer is so big it might not fit in all your brains even if you, like, took them out of your heads and squished them together. But that, at least, seems like a perfectly simple thing to do.

If I may offer one more piece of advice, I'd also avoid making points based on what might or might not have allowed the universe to happen, because in this day and age that still comes down to personal belief and, as Jeff just demonstrated, if the other guy doesn't share your personal belief then your discussion has lost both objectivity and common ground. You need at least one of those. Otherwise, the other guy can't listen to you, even if they want to, and you're both reduced to talking at each other instead of with.

[Top Gun]

I'm instantly reminded of why a forum I help moderate has all but banned endless single-line quoting in serious discussions, because it rarely accomplishes anything other than turning a thread into a convoluted nigh-unreadable mess. There are a few points in here I'd genuinely like to respond to, but dear lord I am not getting sucked into that nonsense.

[Jeff250]

How can science be done as easily if cause and effect do not exist?

Exactly the way it is done now, except with an asterisk saying that science is the study of humans' experience of the universe and not necessarily to the universe itself.

To help motivate this some more, there are similar reservations around the concept of time and how much of it is the universe itself and how much of it is merely our human experience of it. For instance, time includes the notion of "now" which progresses "later" at a certain "rate" (of seconds per ...?!), but it is an often debated concept whether this is the universe itself or whether it is a construct of our human minds. Just as we can't imagine something outside of cause and effect, we can't imagine something outside of time, without a "now" or a "before" or a "later" (the closest I can imagine is something that doesn't move), because all of these are necessary conditions for human experience. However, just as with cause and effect, our notions of time which we often ascribe to the universe might really be only features of our experience of it and not properties of the universe itself. Just as with cause and effect, there is no a priori reason to believe in time, and it stops making sense to talk about it outside of our universe. It doesn't make sense to talk about what caused the universe for the same reason it doesn't make sense to talk about what was before the universe.

However, what impact does this have on science? Absolutely none.

[Jeff250]

see no problem with evolution resulting in a constant increase in complexity by your own definition

Just out of curiosity, do you believe in the common understanding of how galaxies evolved, of how solar systems evolved, etc.? I do agree with you though that one way to look at evolution is as a way to explain how biological complexity arose from simpler conditions. In the same way, going back even further in time, different astronomical/astrophysical theories explain how the complex celestial objects that we have today arose from simpler conditions. If you want to go back even further to try to explain the complexity of universal constants, etc., that's of course where things get tricky. Some use a multiverse, but as we both agree such a concept is entirely untestable.

[LightWolf]

I'm not sure if you're understanding my claim -- I'm not asking why did God create a universe instead of a balloon. I'm asking why is there a God instead of a balloon. If you can imagine an eternal, unchanging, timeless God having existed without a cause, then why not an eternal, unchanging, timeless balloon existing without a cause? It could be that, instead of a God who created our universe, instead of all of that, there's just a balloon, an eternal, unchanging, timeless balloon, and no God, and no universe, and that's it. So why did we get a universe-creating-God instead of a balloon? Or a sock? Or nothing at all? I mean, almost nothing can create universes, right? So why did we end up with our eternal, unchanging, timeless thing being a universe-creating deity? We seem pretty lucky according to your theory. I'll take my chances with my self-replicating amino acids in my pool of organic chemicals.

...

Again, I'm not asking why do you believe in God/Jehovah instead of Allah. I'm saying, instead of God being Jehovah, God could have been Allah. God could have been Zeus. God could have really liked unicorns and hated elephants. But no. We end up with the elephant-loving one that hated unicorns and that isn't like Allah and isn't like Zeus but is a lot like Jehovah and has so many attributes he has so many of these books in the Bible spending so much space attempting to describe all of his attributes. That's why your god is complex. Because you can imagine so many possible variations but yet we wound up with this very specific one. And most importantly, not a sock.

Let me put it this way: There is a lot of evidence for Jesus, and what he claimed to do (and virtually none against that doesn't boil down to 'the supernatural is impossible'). This is only possible if we're dealing with Jehovah instead of Allah, Zeus, or a sock. That's how I can know - not just believe - that it's Jehovah. Also, I'm defining complexity not in terms of what he could be, but what he is.

Also a thought on your descriptions and complexity - look at everything describing him as good. What does good ultimately mean? Consistent with his character. We have taken God and defined good on that basis. (In trying to escape God, we have adopted alternate definitions, but this is how the Bible uses it.) God cannot be anything other than good, as that is inherently inconsistent. This is not the only such trait, meaning many descriptions do not have the "multiple options" issue you bring up.

Either way, a few #define's or a personal deity, you have unexplained complexity. I'm just choosing the side of radically less unexplained complexity. There's no "because God" escape hatch to this problem.

...

Another #define? My point isn't that it's nothing. Just that it's inconsequential.

You're choosing the side of unexplainable complexity by refusing an explanation. Where did God's complexity come from? "come from" implies a lot, such that it started. Given God's properties (including that everything is abstract), he didn't have to "come from" anywhere. He fits the criteria of an entity that didn't have to. Therefore, I have an explanation for the complexity. It's easy to prove that it was God instead of a sock (does a sock have free will and intelligence?), and historical evidence points to Jesus, requiring Jehovah instead of Zeus.

And I would argue that it's not inconsequential, as it's the primary line between whether or not we could be created or had to wait for a random chemical process.

I would never say that. You're the one that believes that everything was created by a complicated personal deity. If you wanted to go the simplest route, you would believe in a personalityless multiverse I suppose.

Actually a multiverse is highly complex, as you not only have to describe the possibilities, but you have to describe every single one of an infinite number. You also have the same problem - where did it come from? God is the simplest sufficient explanation that isn't unexplainable. 'Nothing' is insufficient, as it inherently lacks the means to start the universe and make it the way it is. If there's anything in-between that is sufficient, I'd love to hear it.

To help motivate this some more, there are similar reservations around the concept of time and how much of it is the universe itself and how much of it is merely our human experience of it. For instance, time includes the notion of "now" which progresses "later" at a certain "rate" (of seconds per ...?!), but it is an often debated concept whether this is the universe itself or whether it is a construct of our human minds. Just as we can't imagine something outside of cause and effect, we can't imagine something outside of time, without a "now" or a "before" or a "later" (the closest I can imagine is something that doesn't move), because all of these are necessary conditions for human experience. However, just as with cause and effect, our notions of time which we often ascribe to the universe might really be only features of our experience of it and not properties of the universe itself. Just as with cause and effect, there is no a priori reason to believe in time, and it stops making sense to talk about it outside of our universe.

There has definitely been a lot of interesting stuff with time. The best way I've heard about it is as the distance between two events - same kind of distance as between you and your keyboard. However, whatever it's based on (mass seems to play a huge role via relativity), time does progress at a rate, just like when walking you move at a rate. You have to look relative to something else in both cases, but that progression is there. So there is a good reason to believe in time, even if it's conceived differently than most people perceive it. Likewise, you have to assume that doing something will, regardless of whatever intermediate chain there is, yield a specific result. If this is not the case, and cause and effect is just perception, then you destroy science, as you cannot assume that the cause and effect chain will persist in the future - or that it's worked the same in the past. If cause and effect is just perception, then you have no way of knowing that historical fossils spontaneously generated and the world started two days before you were born from a sock.

It doesn't make sense to talk about what caused the universe for the same reason it doesn't make sense to talk about what was before the universe.

If nothing caused it, then how did the universe start?

Just out of curiosity, do you believe in the common understanding of how galaxies evolved, of how solar systems evolved, etc.? I do agree with you though that one way to look at evolution is as a way to explain how biological complexity arose from simpler conditions. In the same way, going back even further in time, different astronomical/astrophysical theories explain how the complex celestial objects that we have today arose from simpler conditions. If you want to go back even further to try to explain the complexity of universal constants, etc., that's of course where things get tricky. Some use a multiverse, but as we both agree such a concept is entirely untestable.

It's complicated. I do not believe that the big bang specifically led to how things are, but the model does have well-proven elements, such as the expanding universe. The big issue is that the full model and Genesis 1 are incompatible, as they describe completely different orders in which things happen (i.e. Earth before the sun), and most linguists (believer or not) agree that it is meant to be interpreted in that order and as taking a very short period of time. Probably not literal 24 hour days, but certainly not several years. I have seen two alternative models which I tend to bounce between. The first is the "Thanos-snap" model (as I like to call it), where God said "let there be" and it happened instantly (or extremely quickly). The other keeps more of the standard model at the cost of a bunch of fancy stuff happening around Earth (including black holes triggering relativity, explaining how things are visible from billions of lightyears away from a 6,000 year old Earth). I might not present this exactly right, as it has been a while since I read it and I'm going off memory; if you want to look it up, see Starlight and Time by Dr. Russell Humphreys. Basically, this second model says that the universe started as a uniform sea of water (could be hydrogen for all I care; I'll just keep calling it water for now, meaning whatever substance was there). "Let there be light" triggered fusion. The firmament splits some of the water to form more distant bodies while the local fusion forms our solar system. Somewhere in here, a black hole forms around (could be near) Earth. IIRC it was to aid the fusion process, possibly even be the thing that sparked it, could be wrong though. This black hole has the side effect of slowing everything near it down, meaning that while billions of years occur outside, only a week occurs inside. As this process proceeds, eventually the black hole is miraculously converted to a white hole. Loop Quantum Gravity, among other things (including the distance model of time funnily enough), says that a black hole will eventually have enough internal force that it will invert itself, making a miracle unnecessary (how's that for predictive power? Got both relativity and LQG). From there, events happen on Earth while the common understanding plays out throughout the universe. As I hinted at earlier, this model jumps through a lot of near-Earth hoops, but reading about LQG does make it at least plausible in my mind. The Thanos-snap model comes in a few flavors, but generally involves the vast majority of planets etc being created with the stars. I've heard people say that the point in which expansion starts accelerating in the standard model is where the universe began. My only issue with this model is that it involves light being created in transit (why would this need to be the case?), meaning atheist science is interpreting a bunch of null pointer exceptions. That said, reading Genesis 2 and the insane plant growth rate it implies did spark a thought (not going to call it a theory at this point) - what if the speed of light were higher, maybe with other constants being different as well? Then, the fall & the curse would have set them to (or at least moving toward) where they are today. Not going to think too much into that until I have an answer to that question though. What I do know is that there is strong reason to believe the Bible, and the Bible provides a certain origins timeline, and whatever process (or lack thereof) needs to fit that timeline. Much of the standard model is not contrary, but some of the important aspects are.

If I may offer one more piece of advice, I'd also avoid making points based on what might or might not have allowed the universe to happen, because in this day and age that still comes down to personal belief and, as Jeff just demonstrated, if the other guy doesn't share your personal belief then your discussion has lost both objectivity and common ground. You need at least one of those. Otherwise, the other guy can't listen to you, even if they want to, and you're both reduced to talking at each other instead of with.

Regarding your general comments, I'm pretty sure both Jeff and I are well aware we're not going to convince the other. Regarding this specific point, there is a way which it happened, and that's why I'm trying to argue toward a certain way. I don't see it as fundamentally different in a debate sense than the evolution debate, as personal belief is driving this whole thing. The only reason I bring it up is because it's a good way to establish whether or not God exists, one side excluding evolution while the other almost requires it.

With that said, all parties willing, this thread is eating up a lot of my time; since we can't really go anywhere, if y'all want to give it a rest, I would be okay with that.

[Jeff250]

I want to respond to one comment quickly that I don't think will be too controversial, and then I will summarize where I am.

Actually a multiverse is highly complex, as you not only have to describe the possibilities, but you have to describe every single one of an infinite number.

It depends on your metric, but from a Kolmogorov complexity standpoint, it's a lot easier to say that a universe for every possible combination of constants exists. That's a complexity of one short sentence. That's a lot simpler than G = 6.674..., C = 2.299..., etc., i.e., having to define every single one of them to some number (!?) of digits.

-----

To summarize where I am, you state that God doesn't need a reason to exist. I state that the universe does not need a reason to exist.

You state that, given there is no God, then we are lucky that our universe has certain physical constants because otherwise we never would have existed. I state that, given that there is a God, then we are lucky that this God had certain universe-creating powers, since virtually all of the other kinds of things he could have been, such as a balloon or a sock, don't have the power to create universes, and we never would have existed.

You state that, given there is no God, then the universal constants are unexplained complexity. I state that, given that there is a God, then this personal deity, with intricate personality and taste, is even more unexplainedly complex than a handful of constants, at least as complex as a human.

[LightWolf]

There is some nuance to the 'no reason to exist' thing, and I still contend you're making God more complex than he is, but I think that's good enough to leave off on.

[Alter-Fox]

Debating even without expecting to change anyone's point of view can still be worthwhile -- however, even if all you intend to do is defend your position, without objectivity or common ground you're not even doing that. It just might feel like you are -- right up until the moment the next person says something that makes it clear they didn't care what you meant.
If you disagree on your premises, whatever logic you apply to them won't matter.
You can trust me on all this 'cause I used to get into it a whole lot on this very board, and ultimately made the decision to stop because it was entirely pointless.

I won't pretend I've read every point on this thread, because as Top Gun pointed out that would be near-impossible. But the parts I did read for the most part looked a lot like a bunch of people who couldn't agree on a premise, and just shouted back and forth without really understanding what the other was trying to say -- even when they might have felt like they did. Nobody gains anything from that kind of discussion, and the best thing you can do is agree to disagree -- which is the exact same place you started in.



Now I would end here, but the friendly-reminder meerkat told me to make sure you know that the more times different forms of the word "complexity" come up in your discussion, the larger the number of difficult equations you need to cite becomes before anything you've said becomes understandable or useful.
I haven't seen equations at all yet, so, if somebody does decide to continue with this, it's high time they showed up.

[Jeff250]

Frankly, it's rude to interrupt someone's conversation, to tell them why you think their conversation isn't even worth having, and to conclude with your demands for how the conversation ought to proceed, if it even shall continue. I'm sorry that you didn't find value in a debate that you previously had on this board, but that may also be a reflection of yourself. Your notion that the only value in a debate is for your opponent to adopt your position is violent. Even though it should be enough for you that the participants in the debate found it valuable, I will nevertheless outline for you the value that I found in it. I valued reading the arguments of those with whom I already agreed, even though they couldn't have changed my mind, because I learned even more about topics in which I'm interested. I valued learning which of my arguments worked well and which didn't. I valued learning which of the points I introduced were inessential and just derailed the conversation. I valued learning, by iterating on my arguments over time, the best way to word them to avoid ambiguity and to ensure that my arguments were mutually understood, even if not mutually accepted. I will also assert that, even though I wasn't ultimately convinced to change my position by this debate, my positions on issues over time have evolved as a direct result of discussions I've had on this board.

Unlike most threads in the E&C (which is probably where this topic should have taken place), no rules were broken in this discussion, and if you're not interested in it, then don't click on it.

[Alter-Fox]

Your notion that the only value in a debate is for your opponent to adopt your position is...

...Is the exact opposite of what I actually said. I'm sorry if you're offended by your own opinion of what I meant, but it's plain to see that in this instance that's fully up to you.
For your information, if you had bothered to ask the opinion I actually have on this subject, I would tell you that the most reward a person can hope to get out of a debate is to develop a greater understanding of their own position by having it challenged, because anything more than that is entirely in the hands of someone else.

And for your information, what I actually said, since you clearly didn't understand it, is that not swaying your partner to your position is fine, and even to be expected, but that there could be an effort made to communicate it in more than the vaguest terms. Otherwise, the only thing you're coming away with is that equally vague sense of satisfaction.
And I may have used some hyperbole and silliness to parody my own points in the hope that they'd only be taken as suggestions, but you seem to have taken even those parts on face value.

So just to make it crystal clear, I never talked to an actual meerkat. At least not about this

If all you want to come away from a debate with is a sense of satisfaction, that's fine. But it's not up to you to decide that that's all anyone should want. I wouldn't be here at all if I didn't have the impression there might be someone in here who wants to gain a bit more.

Lightwolf is someone I consider something of a friend, he cared enough about this discussion to split it off from another thread in order to make sure he got to have it, and if he wants to get the most out of it I'd like to help if I can.

[Ferno]

Lightwolf, Alter-fox.

I am God. Prove to the thread that I am who I say I am.

------------

Normally, that's where I'd leave it and carry on with the thread, but this here: "I'm sorry if you're offended by your own opinion of what I meant, but it's plain to see that in this instance that's fully up to you." deserves to be pointed out.

If you want to carry on a respectful conversation, I'd suggest leaving arrogant and condescending comments like this at the door. Your last post comes off as highly disrespectful and I personally won't stand to see it. Suffice to say, trying to make Jeff look like a bad guy like that really rubs people the wrong way, and I can see right through it.

[Top Gun]

I want to apologize if my post caused any offense as well. There were genuinely some points I wanted to chime in on, but I'd become frustrated that the current structure of the discussion felt nearly impenetrable, and I've been in far too many threads over the decades to know how tit-for-tat quote walls usually turn out. I'm glad that the two of you felt satisfied by it, even if I couldn't find a good point to jump in.

One thing that did stick with me that I do want to comment on was when the anthropic principle was raised at some point, because from where I'm sitting at least the weak formulation of it is pretty much just a tautology. "Things would be different if they were different!" Um...thanks for the insight? Or to perhaps slightly give it more credit, the idea that the fundamental universal constants having the values they do is what allows us to exist in order to note this fact doesn't say anything particularly profound to me, because if they were different, then obviously we wouldn't be here to comment on them, so who cares?

[Jeff250]

No worries. I appreciate that walls of quotes aren't everyone's favorite communication style.

[vision]

There were genuinely some points I wanted to chime in on...

Me too. There seemed like a good point to talk about carcinization but that window closed pretty fast, haha.

[Top Gun]

Gah, I was going to mention that too! I had a "Why does nature keep evolving crabs?" video stuck in my YouTube recommendations for months.

[Alter-Fox]

I did get a little heated after Jeff's post misrepresented the entire point I'd been trying to make. If that was indeed a genuine misunderstanding, I do owe him an apology, and I apologize.
From where I was sitting, at the time, it looked more like he had picked out one sentence and deliberately ignored the context (I was dismissing an idea, but he seemed to have the impression I was in favour of it -- it was confusing to me) so that he would have a false pretext to call me immature -- it looked like something that's unfortunately common in internet arguments, so I could have ended up with the wrong impression based on that.

I'd made the assumption that since this is the internet where nobody can force you to do anything, whatever I said would be taken as a suggestion even without making that intent clear.

I'd like to help people to grow their personal beliefs if that's something they want to do, even if I don't agree with those beliefs. I saw someone I like making some of the same mistakes I did in the past which caused me plenty of pain and frustration, and seemingly getting disheartened from it, and I wanted to nudge him onto slightly more solid footing. That's the only reason I was ever in here in the first place.
Simply put, I saw a friend who looked burnt out, tried to offer him help if he wanted it even though I didn't agree with what he was saying. I made a mistake while trying to be kind, and I have now been humiliated for it twice. Whether or not I deserved it, I think that's enough.


@Ferno I think you meant well, but you came very very close to crossing more than one very serious personal line in your post there. I'm trusting you right now because I still believe you to be a fair-minded person, but I'm not sure I should. Please keep that in mind.

[Jeff250]

One thing that did stick with me that I do want to comment on was when the anthropic principle was raised at some point, because from where I'm sitting at least the weak formulation of it is pretty much just a tautology. "Things would be different if they were different!" Um...thanks for the insight? Or to perhaps slightly give it more credit, the idea that the fundamental universal constants having the values they do is what allows us to exist in order to note this fact doesn't say anything particularly profound to me, because if they were different, then obviously we wouldn't be here to comment on them, so who cares?

I agree with this argument to an extent, but I don't think it completely solves the problem. What we don't want to say as a bunch of arrogant humans is that the only "good" universes are universes where humans ultimately existed and that all of the other ones are bad ones because that would be us being a bunch of self-centered, unimaginative pricks. If Vulcans ended up somewhere in the universe, even though there were no humans, it would probably be a pretty nice universe too. OK, but what if the universe is incapable of supporting any conscious life? That's tricky to even talk about because we don't have any method for measuring whether something is conscious or not, and the only person who might know whether Lt. Cmdr. Data is conscious is him (although only in the case that he is). But even if we assume that consciousness requires complex organic molecules arranged in complicated patterns, our human arrogance might just be overestimating the value of consciousness and failing to imagine other things that might be interesting that we would be equally unable to measure or perhaps be unable to even conceive of. But once we start talking about a universe where atoms aren't even possible, that universe is a hard sell for me. Maybe humans aren't the end-all be-all of universes, but atoms seem pretty important, and this universe seems pretty fortunate to have them.

[Spidey]

Why are atoms so important? Surely a giant space brain could be made of pure energy, or perhaps the entire universe is conscious.

[Jeff250]

That's true, but I suppose if consciousness is so easy to arise, then in some sense that makes this universe even more lucky to have atoms since we didn't even need them in the first place.

[Darth Wang]

I stopped bothering to seriously engage with creationists a long time ago, mainly because their ridiculous attacks on evolution and the double standards they have for it compared to other branches of science make their agenda so obvious.

Did you know that there's much more evidence for evolution than there is for gravity? No, really. Gravitational waves were only just recently detected in 2015 after being posited for over 100 years, and the graviton, the fundamental particle of gravity, is still only hypothetical. No one has ever seen or measured one. But most creationists have no problem with the theory of gravity, because it doesn't contradict an obviously metaphorical story about naked people in a garden with a talking snake. (And the majority of Christians worldwide recognize the story to be metaphorical).

If the Bible said that it was angels pulling things back to Earth that made them fall, and didn't say that every creature was created individually, you just know they'd be going after gravity instead of evolution, regardless of the actual scientific evidence or lack thereof.