Conclusive evidence for Design!

[prodigalson2011]

Which begs the question: Relative to what? It is only relative between two observers moving relative to each other. Here’s a simple explanation of that from Caltech: theory.caltech.edu/people/patricia/srelb.html

As it says at the end of the explanation: What we’ve learned here is called Relativistic time dilation. The process that occurred in the blue driver’s rest frame with in time T’ was perceived by the red driver to have occurred in (a time much greater than T).

As it explained, you need two observers. The time dilation only appears to be such for one observer, from his position, relative to the other. As you quote Schroeder:

Each time the universe doubles in size, the perception of time halves as we project that time back toward the beginning of the universe.

You seem to be missing the point he is making here. When he says that the perception of time halves as we project back to the beginning of the universe, he means that it appears as such for someone in one position compared to another. Time for someone at point A moving away from another person at point B as the universe expands (faster than the speed of light as it’s the space that’s expanding, not the positions moving) will see an event happening in time T. But the person at point B will see it happening slower. And the reverse is true.

You do not need 2 observers for the principle to apply. The clock experiment that proved the relativity of time is proof of that. Both clocks suffered the effects of relativity, and clocks don’t observe anything. You are misinterpreting that article. The fact that there were 2 observers in that particular experiment does not mean that relativity is dependent on 2 separate sentient beings.

If you are not familiar with this experiment, I’ll explain: two clocks, perfectly synchronized, were placed in two different planes. These planes were flown at different altitudes, directions and speeds (altering their velocity and the force of gravity upon them). When the planes landed, the clocks showed different times. This clearly had nothing to do with anyone’s subjective perception of time. The relativity of time is not a subjective experience, it is an empirical fact of time and space. It’s not even dependent upon the existence of persons, period.

The further you are away from someone, the faster the distance grown between you, the slower time will appear to be. It is not a ‘universal’ slowing of time that affects everyone. It is different dependant on where you are (wait for it…) relative to each other.

Again, this is not what relativity means. It has nothing to do with how far away from “someone” you are, it has to do with the relative gravity, velocity, etc. of a particular location. There are undoubtedly places light years away from here where the flow of time is about the same as it is here. But anyway, the flow of time will be different based on these factors regardless of whether anyone is present or not.

Anyway, as we measure time based on our position in the universe looking back at time, the “observer” in Genesis is measuring time based on the revealed perspective of the beginning of the universe. From that perspective, looking forward to the creation of man’s soul (circa 4000, B.C.) would appear to take 6 days, in the same way that looking back to the Big Bang for us appears to be 15 billion years. It’s a simple inversion.

But that ‘something’ at the beginning of time has had to remain in exactly the same position for the duration of the universe so that it can move relatively to us as the Universe expanded. Then and only then, as the space between us has been increasing for the last 15 billion years does that clock have any meaning and that clock has meaning only to that something.

Now that something can’t be God, because you would then have to say that God exists within time and is fixed at a particular place relative to us.

This assumes that God cannot look at and/or reveal things from a particular perspective.

 

[prodigalson2011]

Schroeder knows all this. He is playing with figures so that they come out to something nice and acceptable for anyone who wants to believe in 7 days-worth of creation but doesn’t want to delve too deeply into the physics. And you don’t have to delve very far at all.

He is not playing with figures. He takes the Biblical data, as understood for centuries by Torah scholars, and then takes the relevant principles of physics and applies them.

Let’s lay them out.

1. Description of the first 5 1/2 days until the creation looks forward from the beginning of time. In other words, the perspective of the author is as of someone standing at the beginning of time, peering into the future.
2. The difference in the flow of time between our modern day Earth and the very early universe (i.e. the beginning of time and matter) is a factor of a million million.
3. Ergo, the difference in the perception of time between us and the author of Genesis will be by a factor of a million million.
4. When you multiply the days of Genesis by a million million and then do the necessary division to group them into years, you arrive at a figure of about 15 billion, which is in perfect harmony with modern science.
5. Further, when you account for the doubling in the size of the universe and the halving of the flow of time across the board, it follows that each successive day will be about half as long as the preceding day.
6. When the days are divided accordingly, the history of both the cosmos and Earth itself as understood by science aligns freakishly well with Genesis. What few abberations there may be (for instance, “the spirit hovered over the face of the waters”) are easily addressed by referring once again to these ancient Torah commentaries which explain nuances and idiosyncracies of the Hebraic language, where words may have double meanings or symbolic import (i.e., “the face of the waters” referred not to literal water but the thin, formless substance that preceded matter [what we nowadays call “energy”] in Nachmanides’ commentary.)

 

[prodigalson2011]

Again, this is not what relativity means. It has nothing to do with how far away from “someone” you are, it has to do with the relative gravity, velocity, etc. of a particular location. There are undoubtedly places light years away from here where the flow of time is about the same as it is here. But anyway, the flow of time will be different based on these factors regardless of whether anyone is present or not.

I wanted to edit this section, but ran out of time. Here’s the “revised version”:

Again, this is not what relativity means. It has nothing to do with how far away from “someone”, or even something, you are. It has to do with the relative gravity, velocity, etc. of a particular location. The effect of universal expansion applies equally across the board (i.e. the perception of time is halved everywhere, so where we measure an hour here and 3 hours on Planet X, with the doubling of the size of the universe, our hour becomes a half an hour and Planet X’s 3 hours becomes 1 1/2 hours.) And actually, there are undoubtedly places light years away from here where the flow of time is about the same as it is here. But anyway, the flow of time will be different based on these factors regardless of whether anyone is present or not.

 

[prodigalson2011]

Prodigal:

Precisely. What we would be witness to would be a plethora of individuated life forms, with very few, if any, of them nestled within a classification, such as, “species,” or “genera.” (Just another bold example of order and design.)

God bless,
jd

Or would we? Assuming, for the sake of this argument, the truth of materialistic abiogenesis, given the odds stacked against the emergence of life to begin with, I would argue that we would likely only see life emerge on Earth once. If that life weren’t able to reproduce, it would die and the history of life on Earth would fit in the margins of a single sheet of paper.

In summary: the ability of life to reproduce is a fortuitous circumstance that I think is taken for granted by too many. As soon as life emerges, we see that it comes packed with at least one purpose: to continue!

 

[Bradski]

You do not need 2 observers for the principle to apply.

But this is precisely what Schroeder is talking abuut. He even uses the example of a pulse of light being sent from one place to another. The person in one place experiences the Doppler effect as information from the other place is received.

That is, as the universe expands, the time it takes for one quanta of information to arrive gets longer. But it has to leave one place and arrive at another for that to be experienced. There have to be *two different places *moving away from each other for the effect to be experienced.

The same experience with sound can only occur if the source of the sound and the person hearing the sound are moving away from each other. And this is what Schroeder is talking about. It’s the ‘red shift’ in information that someone would observe from a specific vantage point other than earth.

 

[prodigalson2011]

But this is precisely what Schroeder is talking abuut. He even uses the example of a pulse of light being sent from one place to another. The person in one place experiences the Doppler effect as information from the other place is received.

That is, as the universe expands, the time it takes for one quanta of information to arrive gets longer. But it has to leave one place and arrive at another for that to be experienced. There have to be *two different places *moving away from each other for the effect to be experienced.

The same experience with sound can only occur if the source of the sound and the person hearing the sound are moving away from each other. And this is what Schroeder is talking about. It’s the ‘red shift’ in information that someone would observe from a specific vantage point other than earth.

All true enough, but I would point out that this is only one part of relativity. You’re not taking into account things like gravitational time dilation.

Regardless, what does this have to do with Schroeder’s theory? Originally you were arguing that relativity was dependent on two observers and that there was no observer in the early universe. Now you’ve shifted to the necessity of two locations, which is actually central to the theory–those two locations being the beginning point of time and matter from which everything is moving (the Biblical perspective) and Earth (from whence we gather our scientific perspective) which is that which is moving away from it. As perceived from that beginning point (as the Torah commentators’ teach Genesis is written), where time flows a million million times faster than it does on Earth, the math works. A description of a period of about 6 days as anchored in that locus of the universe would be measured as 15 billion years on Earth.

 

[tonyrey]

I stated a few weeks ago that size is not related to significance. I don’t think that is always true. If the universe were very small there wouldn’t not be so much evidence of immense power and wisdom. To create something from nothing is a prodigious feat but a tiny universe would raise the question of its purpose.

If there were only one planet there would be no doubt it existed for the sake of its inhabitants but if there were only a handful of inhabitants it would be far less impressive than our world. Yet even one life is immensely significant and all for the more valuable for being unique!

These possibilities demonstrate how misleading it is to deduce significance solely from size. There is no obvious reason why our universe should be so vast - apart from the enjoyment of unlimited creative power. That seems the best solution because it is a mistake to think of everything in terms of utility. There are so many luxuries in life which aren’t necessary for survival that physical necessity is a hopelessly inadequate explanation. Although necessity is the mother of invention it doesn’t account for all the exquisite colours, perfumes, sounds and sensations in nature.

“All the sounds of the earth are like music” isn’t strictly true but it does correspond to the basic reality of an unspoilt world. There are moments when most people feel as if they are in heaven and others when they think they are in hell! Only a small minority wish they had never been born - not usually because of natural events but human limitations. From an unprejudiced point of view “Paradise Lost” is an accurate description of the biosphere . The “Inferno” is true only for an apostle of gloom and doom…

 

[Bradski]

All true enough, but I would point out that this is only one part of relativity. You’re not taking into account things like gravitational time dilation.

Regardless, what does this have to do with Schroeder’s theory?

Gravity? Who is talking about gravity? My argument has every thing to do with what Schroder is talking about because I am repeating what Schroder is saying.

I’m going to pass on this because we seem to be talking at cross purposes. Thanks for the (name removed by moderator)ut.

 

[JDaniel]

Or would we? Assuming, for the sake of this argument, the truth of materialistic abiogenesis, given the odds stacked against the emergence of life to begin with, I would argue that we would likely only see life emerge on Earth once. If that life weren’t able to reproduce, it would die and the history of life on Earth would fit in the margins of a single sheet of paper.

In summary: the ability of life to reproduce is a fortuitous circumstance that I think is taken for granted by too many. As soon as life emerges, we see that it comes packed with at least one purpose: to continue!

Prodigal:

I agree. I think the primary dynamic of life is survival, and the key ingredient of survivability is reproduction.

It’s also interesting that these dimensionless particles, of Day 1, are still with us, forming the (at least) eight cornered, 3-dimensional lattices, filled with space, that provide the appearance of volume and mass that we “see” today.

I’m not willing to admit abiogenesis yet.

God bless,
jd

 

[prodigalson2011]

Gravity? Who is talking about gravity? My argument has every thing to do with what Schroder is talking about because I am repeating what Schroder is saying.

I’m going to pass on this because we seem to be talking at cross purposes. Thanks for the (name removed by moderator)ut.

My point was that the relativity of time is not dependent upon distance alone. Gravity plays a very important role as well (refer again to the aforementioned experiment.)

And I notice you erased the rest of my post wherein I pointed out that your objection is perfectly well accounted for in Schroeder’s theory. Saying “What does this have to do with it?” was a misutterance on my part. What I meant is that, yes, this is what Schroeder is talking about and he also, contrary to your assertion, covers those bases perfectly well.

 

[tonyrey]

A fascinating review of Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos has just appeared and is well worth reading:

The problem, however, is that information is now proving itself to be a fundamental entity of science that cannot be explained in this sort of self-assembling gradually-building-up way. Conservation of information results that my colleagues and I have been proving over the last five years at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (go to the publications page there) show that the** information in living systems is never created by material processes **but merely shuffled around and that, in fact, the problem of explaining biological information only intensifies as one traces it through material processes.

At this point Nagel might say that we’ve merely proved his point and that some deeper teleological principles are needed to account for the information in biological systems. But in fact, we’ve proved the opposite, because we have no experience at all of abstract principles producing such information while we do know that concrete intelligences are capable of producing it. At some level, Nagel is still committed to the hierarchical reductionism of Richard Dawkins, which sees the world as a system of hierarchical levels in which each level is built up from units residing at lower levels. The problem is that information, the sort we see in biology, cannot be understood hierarchically in this way. ** Information is holistic**, and explaining such information, short of its creation by an intelligence, is always a reworking of prior information that is at least as complex and difficult to explain as the information in question…

A Dream of Completeness
Nagel’s desire for completeness, much like Descartes’s desire for certainty, is an ill-considered desideratum. We’re not God and we’ll never be God. We are finite rational creatures whose knowledge is always going to be limited.** Our best evidence from biology suggests that it contains information of a sort that is the result of intelligence.** Such an account will necessarily be incomplete because we cannot get into the mind of this designing intelligence and know it completely (though there may be some inferences we can draw about it, such as that we are dealing with a super-intellect that knows a lot about nano-engineering, certainly with respect to the molecular biology of the cell).

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed Nagel’s new book. For its critique of Darwinian naturalism and for underscoring its crashing failure to explain consciousness, cognition, and morality, Nagel is great. He’s a philosopher, and this is a philosophical book, so readers will be treated to a terrific overview of the big problems in philosophy from a master of the art. The book’s weakness is in failing to follow through the logic of intelligent design, looking to ID solely for its critique of Darwinian evolution but being unwilling to dispassionately consider why its critique was tendered in the first place and the alternative it proposes. And this failure, though Nagel would agree without calling it that, results from his allergy to theism and his preference for atheism.

Nagel is at least on the right road but materialism is so deeply entrenched in our secular society even those who recognise its short-comings are enslaved by it.

 

[tonyrey]

Design is based above all on the power of mind about which there can be no doubt whatsoever. The facts are impossible to deny from any point of view. Every theory, every rational conclusion, every invention and every scientific achievement is based on insight and understanding. To suppose inanimate things are at the root of intellectual progress is one of the most absurd hypotheses propounded by so-called scientific authorities. It dates back to ancient times when there was no knowledge of logic or science. Yet even then the vast majority of people not only recognised intuitively the profound difference between persons and things but lived according to that fact - like all civilised people today.

To reject Design is equivalent to regarding oneself as a mindless object - unless it can be demonstrated that the mind is no more than the product of electrical impulses.

The only problem is that a demonstration effected by electrical impulses is worthless. Would you base all your decisions on results obtained from a undesigned machine?

 

[Abnormality]

Design is based above all on the power of mind about which there can be no doubt whatsoever. The facts are impossible to deny from any point of view. Every theory, every rational conclusion, every invention and every scientific achievement is based on insight and understanding. To suppose inanimate things are at the root of intellectual progress is one of the most absurd hypotheses propounded by so-called scientific authorities. It dates back to ancient times when there was no knowledge of logic or science. Yet even then the vast majority of people not only recognised intuitively the profound difference between persons and things but lived according to that fact - like all civilised people today.

To reject Design is equivalent to regarding oneself as a mindless object - unless it can be demonstrated that the mind is no more than the product of electrical impulses.

The only problem is that a demonstration effected by electrical impulses is worthless. Would you base all your decisions on results obtained from a undesigned machine?

Hello Tonyrey.

When you say that God designed the Universe, what kind of design are you talking about?

 

[tonyrey]

Hello Tonyrey.

When you say that God designed the Universe, what kind of design are you talking about?

Welcome to the forum!

Design is rational activity which results in valuable and purposeful projects.

 

[buffalo]

A fascinating review of Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos has just appeared and is well worth reading:

Nagel is at least on the right road but materialism is so deeply entrenched in our secular society even those who recognise its short-comings are enslaved by it.

They are desperately looking for a substitute for Darwinism within the materialistic frame. They have FAITH it is there, just waiting to be found.

 

[tonyrey]

They are desperately looking for a substitute for Darwinism within the materialistic frame. They have FAITH it is there, just waiting to be found.

I agree. In our present society the obstacles to faith are immense even for persons with good will. From infancy everyone is exposed to adverts extolling physical comfort and luxury with nothing to inspire moral and spiritual development. The pursuit of pleasure has replaced the pursuit of perfection and role models are no longer saints but celebrities!

 

[Abnormality]

Welcome to the forum!

Design is rational activity which results in valuable and purposeful projects.

I must say, that is a very general statement.

Are you a supporter of the idea that God rearranges physical events to bring about particular actualities that would have been unlikely to occur otherwise?

What about spontaneous complexity?

 

[tonyrey]

Design is rational activity which results in valuable and purposeful projects.

A very general question only requires a very general answer!

Are you a supporter of the idea that God rearranges physical events to bring about particular actualities that would have been unlikely to occur otherwise?

Divine activity is not relevant to a philosophical discussion about evidence for Design. It is a good topic for another thread yet even then the nature of God has to be specified.

What about spontaneous complexity?

What do you understand by spontaneous complexity? Complexity which appears for no reason or for purpose? If so it shirks the issue of how it originated…

 

[tonyrey]

It is unscientific, illogical and unrealistic to believe that complexity appears for no reason or purpose…

 

[Abnormality]

It is unscientific, illogical and unrealistic to believe that complexity appears for no reason or purpose…

However it is not “unscientific” to say that physical qualities functionally arise according to the inherent nature of things. Thus it is not necessary to speak of “direct design” like a watch builder. And so it is not unreasonable to say that there is no direct design or an intelligent rearrangement of natural events; but rather there is a functional rearrangement according to physical laws. Science cannot reject teleology since it cannot measure the cause of physical law; but it does in principle reject the watch maker analogy of design in nature.

The question of whether these manifest complexities can exist with or without an intelligent first cause is a philosophical question. And I would agree that an intelligent first cause is necessary to explain the goal directed manifestations we see in nature; but I don’t agree with the “watch maker” argument and I stand in firm agreement with Richard Dawkins on that count.