Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

@FBM,

Quote:

It boils down to the fact that he has zero evidence

Again, I don't know what his claims are (I read just a little bit of the first post, and it seemed like he was speculating that there is, or was, some pre-existing intelligence of some kind prior to the big bang). But whatever they are, the question is: what counts as evidence?

If the universe is just inanimate, sensless matter in motion, subject to forces, etc. then have you ever wondered how a mere collection of atoms, molecules, or whatever, could suddenly start co-operating and working together in a living organism?

How do these stupid objects suddenly start processing and disseminating information amongst themselves? Where did the "intelligence" come from? A rock?

2 Replies

@layman,

layman wrote:

Quote:
It boils down to the fact that he has zero evidence

Again, I don't know what his claims are (I read just a little bit of the first post, and it seemed like he was speculating that there is, or was, some pre-existing intelligence of some kind prior to the big bang). But whatever they are, the question is: what counts as evidence?

Something we can at least observe. Something to measure would be nice.

Quote:

If the universe is just inanimate, sensless matter in motion, subject to forces, etc. then have you ever wondered how a mere collection of atoms, molecules, or whatever, could suddenly start co-operating and working together in a living organism?

How do these stupid objects suddenly start processing and disseminating information amongst themselves? Where did the "intelligence" come from? A rock?

Sorry, but I'm not speculating about all that. I'm just showing Herald that he's got a **** argument compared to that for the Standard Model.

Incidentally, in this thread I've had to teach Herald that the international scientific community has using the metric system (International System of Units) for a few decades now and that natural selection doesn't mean that every animal that survives is a predator. And similar things on that level. He's also a medical science denialist. Just so you know...

2 Replies

@FBM,

Quote:

he's also a medical science denialist. Just so you know...

Well, OK, that does say a lot, if true.

Quote:

Sorry, but I'm not speculating about all that. I'm just showing Herald that he's got a **** argument compared to that for the Standard Model.

Well, I don't want to speculate either. I have no concrete beliefs about the matter, and I'm not a religious type of person (or even a "spiritual type," whatever that is).

But nonetheless it seems like a legitimate question to me. Lacking any scientific explanation to the contrary, the notion of a pre-existing intelligence seems quite possible, even probable, to me. That alone is some "evidence" for the proposition. So again, I guess the question is what constitutes "evidence?" I certainly wouldn't expect the answer to that question to be found in something "measurable." It not the kind of thing that can be quantified, or tangibly sensed, I figure.

If I find a dead body with a bullet in the head, for me that's evidence of a probable murder. It doesn't tell me who the murderer is, but, still....

1 Reply

@layman,

I agree that it's a legitimate question, and any proposed answer needs to be equally legitimate. Saying that it's ancient intelligent life forms in itself doesn't bother me. I accept it as reasonably plausible. But then we slip into infinite regress. Where did that ILF come from? Etc ad infinitum. So it's not a very satisfactory answer, especially sans evidence. What I refuse to accept is Herald's assertion that his story is on a par with the Standard Model. That's not the same thing as saying I believe that scientific answers are ultimately true. Evidence can come in a wide variety of forms, but without some scrap of something, you may as well just accept any story anybody makes up.

1 Reply

@FBM,

FBM wrote:

Something we can at least observe. Something to measure would be nice.

     Wonderful, you can start measuring all the contradictions of your 'theory' versus the rest of the standard knowledge (classical physics, quantum mechanics, math logic, etc.) - how the law for conservation of energy for example is applied to the Big Bang 'theory' at time zero, how can you have gravity without any force carrier, how can you attract matter out of Nothing, how can you make inference by analogy ... on reversed?! inference; what is the probability for the Universe: (1) to have always existed; (2) to have been created without any Intelligence; (3) to have been created by some Meta-Intelligence of any kind; (4) to be inserted worlds - of the type onion shells; (5) to be some other case that we cannot possibly imagine.
     All that is measurable - in case you have the metrics.
     Oh, I forgot - what is the probability for you to have the TV shows of the aliens (if exist) in the data from the radio telescope and to be unable to decrypt them: if you don't know anything about the code, the method of encryption, the way of thinking of the aliens, the encryption algorithm (if it is an algorithm at all), the decryption key (if they have used any key at all); ... or until you don't become sufficiently knowledgeable not to fall into hysteria and not to destroy everything ... for 'security considerations'.

1 Reply

@FBM,

And Herald is very good at imagination and creating stuff from nothing. LOL

He has no foundation for any of his perloined guesses. PUFF! Like magic.

2 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

And Herald is very good at imagination and creating stuff from nothing.

Ci, have you read something else except for the last post - I doubt. You cannot make inference by analogy on reversed processes - do you understand that or you will need some subtitles?
Take for example the following. We have a river coming out of the spring and flowing downstream under the gravitation forces, fluidity properties of the water, etc. Your 'theory' takes that observation and patches it to some brand new theory by claiming that: in the very same way in which the river flows downstream under the forces of gravitation and fluidity, the water of the spring is coming up driven by anti-gravitation and anti-fluidity, and it doesn't matter that anti-gravitation and anti-fluidity do not exist in the physical world and nobody has observed anything of the kind, our evidence (of the flowing downstream river) shows that the river can be created out of nothing and out of nowhere and under the influence of anti-gravitation driven by the dark energy and the anti-fluidity driven by the dark matter of the nucleus of Earth ... on the grounds whereof we pronounce everybody, who dares to believe something else, to be retard.

1 Reply

@Herald,

Herald, In order to communicate intelligently, one must first have some sense of the real world - which you lack, and comprehend the English language - which is the primary language used on a2k. Beyond that, you are not capable of intelligent discourse on any subject.

Your so-called lessons belong in primary school. Rolling Eyes

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

Just a thought: Do you ever wonder why you're the one being challenged all the time? You're missing the total message by being stubborn, and not realizing that you're the problem.
There's an important message that you're ignoring; try to figure out what it is.

0 Replies

@Herald,

Herald wrote:

FBM wrote:
Something we can at least observe. Something to measure would be nice.
     Wonderful, you can start measuring all the contradictions of your 'theory' versus the rest of the standard knowledge (classical physics, quantum mechanics, math logic, etc.) - how the law for conservation of energy for example is applied to the Big Bang 'theory' at time zero, how can you have gravity without any force carrier, how can you attract matter out of Nothing, how can you make inference by analogy ... on reversed?! inference; what is the probability for the Universe: (1) to have always existed; (2) to have been created without any Intelligence; (3) to have been created by some Meta-Intelligence of any kind; (4) to be inserted worlds - of the type onion shells; (5) to be some other case that we cannot possibly imagine.
     All that is measurable - in case you have the metrics.
     Oh, I forgot - what is the probability for you to have the TV shows of the aliens (if exist) in the data from the radio telescope and to be unable to decrypt them: if you don't know anything about the code, the method of encryption, the way of thinking of the aliens, the encryption algorithm (if it is an algorithm at all), the decryption key (if they have used any key at all); ... or until you don't become sufficiently knowledgeable not to fall into hysteria and not to destroy everything ... for 'security considerations'.

I know the god-of-the-gaps fallacy when I see it. You sure haven't given me much of a chance to forget it. It's all you have, and you keep repeating it over and over and over and over again, even after having it explained to you in very simple terms. You just keep digging your hole deeper each time. That's why we're stuck at:

4:0

0 Replies

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

And Herald is very good at imagination and creating stuff from nothing. LOL

He has no foundation for any of his perloined guesses. PUFF! Like magic.

He's superb at creating the same logical fallacy a thousand times. If only it helped him instead of hurt him. Some people are just slow learners. Or, in his case, no-learners. Denialism helps, of course, protect him from basic logic. Wink

0 Replies

@layman,

layman wrote:

...the question is: what counts as evidence?...

Well, something like this is pretty hefty: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html

Quote:

(Phys.org)—Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.
Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists have now been able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving both as a wave and as a particle. The breakthrough work is published in Nature Communications.
...

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb192/DinahFyre/1-thefirstever.jpg

Sure beats the hell out of:

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb192/DinahFyre/9148130.jpg

1 Reply

And then there's trivial **** like this that the denialist mindset finds so easy to dismiss in favor of science fiction hypotheses that guarantee immortality. Did I mention that Herald is deeply concerned about being immortal? Yeah. Seems to be a driving force with him and his denialist ilk:

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/68/3/10.1063/PT.3.2718

Quote:

Particle physics and the cosmic microwave background

John E. Carlstrom, Thomas M. Crawford and Lloyd Knox

Fifty years ago Bell Labs scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson encountered a puzzling excess power coming from a horn reflector antenna they had planned to use for radio astronomical observations. After painstakingly eliminating all possible instrumental explanations, they finally concluded that they had detected a faint microwave signal coming from all directions in the sky. 1 That signal was quickly interpreted as coming from thermal radiation left over from a much hotter and earlier period in our universe’s history, and the Big Bang was established as the dominant cosmological paradigm. 2 Cooled by the expansion of the universe to a temperature just below 3 K, so that its intensity peaks in the microwave region of the spectrum, the radiation detected by Penzias and Wilson is known today as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The two scientists were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
The detection of the CMB and the consensus that the universe had a hot and dense early phase led to a fertile relationship between cosmology and particle physics. The hot early universe was a natural particle accelerator that could reach energies well beyond what laboratories on Earth will attain in the foreseeable future. Precise measurements of both the spectrum of the CMB and its tiny variations in brightness from one point to another on the sky reflect the influences of high-energy processes in the early cosmos.
...

0 Replies

@FBM,

What is the evidence for this?:

Quote:

Dark matter is a hypothetical kind of matter that cannot be seen...Dark matter neither emits nor absorbs light or any other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level....its composition long remained speculative...According to consensus among cosmologists, dark matter is composed primarily of a not yet characterized type of subatomic particle...Important as dark matter is thought to be in the cosmos, direct evidence of its existence and a concrete understanding of its nature have remained elusive.

By definition, dark matter cannot be empirically detected, as I understand it. Yet....

Quote:

...the existence of dark matter is generally accepted by the mainstream scientific community...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Is this a "dark matter in the gaps" kinda fallacy, ya figure?

1 Reply

@layman,

Looks more like a non sequitur/red herring fallacy to me. What's your point? In what hypothesis is the Standard Model trying to create a gap in to insert its less plausible, evidence-free hypothesis? Do you understand the g0d-of-the-gaps fallacy?

Dude. Playing Devil's Advocate is a good thing to do, but you need to know when it's applicable first. This ain't it. In what way, exactly, does this provide support for the hypothesis that ancient, extinct alien ILFs/gods are telepathically sending instructions to dictate how the universe runs? That's the hypothesis that's being measured against the Standard Model here. If you want to side with the alien/god/ILF hypothesis, then I respond to you the same way I respond to Herald: show some evidence that is competitive with the evidence for the Standard Model. If you ain't got it, then you ain't got **** but a fantasy.

1 Reply

@FBM,

Quote:

Do you understand the g0d-of-the-gaps fallacy?

Quote:

"God of the gaps" is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence...Some use the phrase to refer to a form of the argument from ignorance fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

Restated:

"Dark matter in the gaps" is a metaphysical perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of dark matter's existence...Some use the phrase to refer to a form of the argument from ignorance fallacy."

As I said before, FBM:

Quote:

You really seem to have mounted an extremely high horse here, FBM.

2 Replies

@layman,

This is your understanding of the g0d-of-the-gaps fallacy? And you think that the current dark matter/energy hypothesis is equivalent? Seriously? Man, the g0d-of-the-gaps fallacy is a fallacious refutation of an opposing hypothesis. The dark matter hypothesis is an extension/continuation of the Standard Model. They're pretty much the opposite of each other. Einstein's cosmological constant is an example. He wasn't trying to discredit physics with it; he was trying to make the physical model work with it. Herald is trying to discredit physics by finding flaws, limts and paradoxes in it in order to justify his science fiction, evidence-free assertion that alien/ILF/gods are the answer. If you can't see the difference...whew. Dood. At some point, playing Devil's Advocate just don't work. If you're open to Scientology and Raelianism, then all I can say is study harder. Not just science, but logic. They sorta go together.

4 Replies

@FBM,

Quote:

Man, the g0d-of-the-gaps fallacy is a fallacious refutation of an opposing hypothesis

Yeah, so? My opposing hypothesis: There is no such thing as dark matter. It is simply an "epicycle" invented to explain the failure of our current conception of gravity. "

1 Reply

@FBM,

Quote:

The dark matter hypothesis is an extension/continuation of the Standard Model.

Yeah, so? The "god" hypothesis is simply an extenstion/continuation of the theological model.

0 Replies

Intelligent Design vs. Casino Universe

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know