Author:
Wade A. Tisthammer
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Date Posted: 09/14/04 3:48pm
In reply to:
Damoclese
's message, "Hitting the Bottle" on 09/13/04 1:23am
> To say that the fossil evidence are
>>beyond question is both highly dubious and
>>inappropriately arrogant given the evidence to the
>>contrary.
>
>The fossil record is questionable in certain ways. I
>doubt anyone would question whether or not those
>creatures were ever really alive.
>
>Your questioning of the fossil record, on the other
>hand, rests on little substance other than "There have
>been times scientists have mistakenly classified
>fossils"
I'm talking specifically about human evolution, not fossils in general. And my pointing out of the dismal track record regarding hominid fossils is quite legitimate grounds for me being skeptical.
>>Precisely. Theism offers explanatory power here.
>
>"God did it" offers no explanatory power.
In that case, "evolution did it" offers no explanatory power.
>Great scientific questions such as "Hmm, I wonder why
>light seems to bend in a prism?" would not have been
>answered or remedied by proffering God as the answer.
But that's not how I'm using theism here. I'm using theism to address philosophical issues, where science has no domain.
>>>You speak as though all other possible worlds are not
>>>of intricate mathematical order. How do you know
>that?
>>
>>I can easily envision possible ones that aren't.
>
>And I can easily envision a conquistador wearing a
>pink rabbit on his head. That doesn't demonstrate
>knowledge that there is in fact a conquistador wearing
>a pink rabbit on his head.
True, but irrelevant. You've totally avoided my point.
>A
>>world being that of chaos, with no consistent
>>mathematical order of any kind.
>
>Even in chaos, there are times and places where things
>seem "orderly".
That is not necessarily the case.
>How do you know our current universe
>isn't in such a state?
Look, our universe behaves according to a set of sophisticated mathematical rules. Neither Ockham's razor nor any other rational principle suggests a larger portion of chaos by which the mathematical principles happen coincidently and that the consistent mathematical rules are just illusory.
>>Picture a hard drive
>>with thoroughly randomized data. No functioning
>>program. But if a program was found with a highly
>>sophisticated operational mathematical matrix
>>patterns...
>
>Then we assume that given a four billion years random
>processes could not produce such a thing? Monkeys on a
>typewriter require something in the millions of years
>to write Shakespeare, I wonder what they'd come up
>with in roughly 22 billion years?
Well, suppose we don't find any monkeys typing. We just find works of Shakespeare written elegantly on a page. All things being equal, wouldn't intelligent design (a writer) be the most natural and reasonable inference? Suppose I obtain a supposedly randomized hard drive and find there's a cool video game on it with sophisticated mathematical algorithms. All things being equal, wouldn't an intelligent designer (a programmer) be the most natural and reasonable inference? It's not that it's impossible for it to be otherwise, it's about the inference to the best explanation.
>>I didn't say all other worlds do not have
>>intricate mathematical order, only that it seems
>>awfully interesting that out of all possible ones,
>>this universe is intricately mathematically ordered..
>>(Again, think of the randomized computer hard drive>)
>
>But we don't "know" that this universe is in fact
>intricately mathematically ordered.
Take a high-level physics class. You'll learn that the universe contains a whole lot of sophisticated mathematical principles governing it.
>We've only been
>here for a snippet of the time all of this stuff has
>been going on. Our existence is said to be something
>less than a second on the universal clock. To infer
>that because we perceive mathematical order at this
>particular time means that the universe is
>fundamentally "orderly" seems to me to be too much of
>a saltation.
So you now want to abandon the uniformity of nature, a crucial principle of science, because...why? Why is it now okay to drag down science? Because it conflicts with your worldviews?
>In fact, in cosmology it seems that the beginning of
>the universe was much less than orderly.
I would say the opposite, given the recent discoveries regarding the physical constants etc.
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