Criteria of 'Existence'

[polytropos]

I looked at this for a while before seeing what imho is the problem. It is the pithy way that laws are stated (and in this case you unintentionally shortened it too far by omitting to say net forces). Newton’s first law applies to any and every object, with or without a net force acting, although it may not be much use if the net force is large or difficult to work out.

Well, my statement was a legitimate instantiation of the law. (Though that’s irrelevant, since we also have never observed a body on which no net forces act.)

The principle is that Aristotle was wrong, matter has no desire to move or to not move. Matter is inert, and when left to itself will always keep on doing whatever it has been doing.

So when sat in a fast moving car with a glass of milk, if the driver slams on the brakes then you keep going until stopped by your seat belt, and your milk also keeps going until stopped by the windscreen. The car may have been accelerating at the time, and so the net force was non-zero, but we care not, since that’s just how the law is expressed. If we want we can calculate that force and subtract it from the before and after.

We now know that the first law is limited to particular observers, but it still works for everyday use.

OK… I think most people here are familiar with Newton’s laws, but none of this really disputes anything I’ve said about what the form of our laws suggests about what they lead us to believe. Actually you seem to agree with me that it leads us to acknowledge an actual disposition in matter, a tendency to “keep on doing whatever it has been doing.” (Though this is consistent with matter having a “desire” in the Aristotelian sense, which doesn’t mean that matter has a mind and desires things like I now desire a cup of coffee. But I think you knew that.)

Newton proposes a phenomenon called universal gravitation, which he uses to explain planetary motion and why things fall. He explains how it works (within the confines of the data available to him) but not why it should be, and so leaves an open question.

Einstein proposes a phenomenon called spacetime, which he uses to explain what gravity is. He explains how spacetime works but not why it should be, and so leaves an open question.

Science is an exploration and there will always be another mountain to climb before we can see further.

Yes, I think we are in agreement. Science is not in the business of correlating observations to resulting phenomena. It does that, but it aims to do more: explain. We posit entities (ie. generate an ontology) because we realize that law-like generalizations, being non-explanatory, are only useful to us if there is some underlying reality that they describe and which is itself explanatory.

As you note, explaining one thing does not explain everything. Often what you have invoked to explain the first thing itself will call for explanation (though not immediately). (We would need a good reason to call just any old physical entity self-explanatory or brute. For it would have to be absolutely distinct from all of the other entities we are invoking it to explain, or else why would we feel as though we should invoke it?)

Have there been cases, say post-Newton, where armchair metaphysicians have proposed a concept such as spacetime or quanta which later was useful in science? There is lots of pure math that later turned out to be useful in science, but I’m not sure the same can be said for metaphysics.

I’m not aware of any metaphysicians who have ever tried to do that. Metaphysicians are not natural scientists, and metaphysics has never existed for the sake of natural science.

 

[polytropos]

A good teacher would certainly not appeal to authority.

What teacher does not appeal to authority? Maybe in a graduate seminar in the sciences, where you might conduct experiments for everything you are taught. But otherwise authority is inextricable from teaching. (And that is no defect.) Even a teacher who tells you the result of certain experiments that you haven’t performed is appealing to authority. That is how most education proceeds; and it generates real knowledge.

These “patterns” just are. Laws don’t exist in nature, according to the definition they are knowledge which we deduce. The phenomena don’t possess or need knowledge of laws, they just naturally make the patterns they do. They are the patterns.

But it’s not the case that the patterns just are; that’s why we try to explain them by positing space-time.

By postulating mass-energy and spacetime, Einstein moves us to what might be called a metaphysical view that everything is everything.

Can you clarify? “Everything is everything” appears to be a tautology and therefore could be deduced a priori, regardless of what physical entities we posit. It appears to be contentless. (Perhaps there is another way to read it; it is surely meant as an imprecise slogan, after all. It could avoid vacuity if it equivocates on “everything,” for example, and means a different thing each time.)

According to this, there could never be a universe with the same physics as ours, but which consists of space without time, or spacetime without energy. All phenomena are interdependent.

How does the second statement follow from the first? If our physics quantifies over time and energy, then obviously neither can be eliminated from our ontology; if they were, our physics would be different.

What exactly does “All phenomena are interdependent” mean? Does that mean when I snap my fingers it depends on a butterfly in Argentina flapping its wings in 1970? (And this is interdependence we are talking about, so surely the butterfly also depends on my future snapping.)

Not only is the sum of the parts greater than the whole, but the parts couldn’t exist without the entirety.

But what does this mean? Fix the meaning of “the entirety.” Then if the entirety were not, then the parts would not be.

I apologize for being difficult. But you started waxing poetic and your last few statements all appear to be vague, tautologous/trivial, or both.

Since everything is everything, since everything is interdependent, these patterns must resolve to one single pattern.

Your argument is unclear, maybe just because you are suppressing a lot of your reasoning. (As we’ve noted, “everything is everything” is prima facie contentless, so it would need to be fleshed out to mean anything to me.) But how would interdependence imply that all patterns “resolve” (whatever that means) to one single pattern?

Suppose that phenomena A and B generate pattern x, and phenomena B and C generate pattern y. The patterns appear “interdependent” (at least in one sense of that term–you have introduced it with relatively little explanation so I just have to guess), but don’t resolve to a single pattern. (Or perhaps they do, if for any two patterns x and y I can simply view a new pattern x & y, but that is, again, trivial, and obviously independent of any finding of physics.)

According to my newly minted Principle of Conservation Of Physicality[sup]1[/sup], that pattern may just exist. We might not be happy with that, but as a certain cosmologist insists, the universe is the way it is whether we like it or not.

[sup]1[/sup] No physical phenomenon can falsifiably be explained by the supernatural.

I don’t see any reason to reject this principle. It would just imply that the explanation of the pattern cannot be discovered by physics, which I already believe.

(As I’ve said, patterns are not more than the phenomena on which they supervene, and the underlying phenomena are not explained by the pattern, as you say, since the phenomena don’t “know” the pattern. But of course, we tend to try to explain the phenomena that patterns refer to, so it’s not the case that “they just naturally make the patterns they do”–at least not, if that were to render further explanation and science otiose.)

 

[Charlemagne_III]

That’s nicely poetic, but you won’t find Newton using God in any of his theories. There’s no way to make predictions, since God is everywhere and everywhen for a believer, and is nowhere and nowhen for a non-believer, and there is no experiment to separate them.

Newton was also wrong there.

“This most beautiful system [the solar system] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Isaac Newton

No he wasn’t wrong about this. The remark of Newton is a logical deduction based upon empirical evidence of an intelligence at work in creation. God does not have to be part of the laws in order to be the source of the laws. He doesn’t have to be in the equations to be the fire in the equations.

Darwin and Einstein agreed. So did Lemaitre. And you are sending me to U-tube for an authoritative rebuttal to Newton, Darwin, and Einstein?

 

[Oreoracle]

“This most beautiful system [the solar system] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Isaac Newton

Okay, but that isn’t a prediction of an experimental outcome. Indeed, most Christians have long since given up on experiments pertaining to God, hence the common sentiment that “God doesn’t submit himself to tests”.

No he wasn’t wrong about this. The remark of Newton is a logical deduction based upon empirical evidence of an intelligence at work in creation. God does not have to be part of the laws in order to be the source of the laws. He doesn’t have to be in the equations to be the fire in the equations.

Darwin and Einstein agreed. So did Lemaitre. And you are sending me to U-tube for an authoritative rebuttal to Newton, Darwin, and Einstein?

If you would like, I could link you to an interesting video by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. The intention of the video isn’t to rebut any of these scientists. Rather, it’s to note a historical pattern, which goes like this: 1) A famous scientist explains a phenomenon that was once attributed to a deity. 2) They encounter a phenomenon or theoretical difficulty that they can’t explain. 3) They postulate that a deity accounts for it. 4) The next scientist shows that this assumption is unnecessary. Rinse and repeat.

In Newton’s case, it was an explanation for why gravity worked as it did that caused him to play the God card. Because we didn’t give up and attribute it to a god like he did, we now have a richer understanding of gravity. This is no more controversial than the claim that we now have a richer understanding of meteorology because we didn’t give up and attribute thunder to Thor.

Generally a good answer to a question prompts more questions. A religious answer, like “Goddidit”, prohibits further questions. It’s a dead end even if it ever happened to be correct. As the saying goes, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that’s all there is to it!”

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Generally a good answer to a question prompts more questions. A religious answer, like “Goddidit”, prohibits further questions. It’s a dead end even if it ever happened to be correct. As the saying goes, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that’s all there is to it!”

There is no reason to say Goddidit and still not pursue how Goddidit.

Einstein wanted to know the mind of God. That is, he wanted to know how Goddidit.

Not whether he did it, but** how** he did it. Newton, Darwin, and Einstein all credit God with doing it, and it’s clear they credit God with doing it because the universe appears to have intelligence behind it that has made the world intelligible to us all. This is how science got such a powerful foothold in the West: the medieval conviction that God’s laws pervade nature, and that all we have to do is read the mind of God to find out what those laws are. We don’t just say Goddidit and stop searching for how Goddidit.

That is to say, the equations are not God, but God is the fire in the equations.

 

[Oreoracle]

There is no reason to say Goddidit and still not pursue how Goddidit.

Surprisingly we actually agree on this point. Yes, if one proposed a way to predict how God would interact with our world, then that would lead to predictions that could be tested.

Unfortunately, I’ve never heard such a proposal, even from people who have taken it upon themselves to inject a god into science. For example, consider the “theory” of intelligent design. I’ve yet to hear a single testable prediction arise from that theory that hasn’t already been demonstrated by the theory of evolution. So the former is really a parasite, leeching off the success of the latter.

The closest anyone’s ever come to pursuing how Goddidit is by deferring physical questions to theology. But again, theology has never told us anything that we didn’t already know from physics. If it is true that 1) there is a god who created everything and 2) he interacts with our universe in testable, predictable ways, then physics should be reducible to theology; that is, any question about laws of physics could be translated to questions about God’s nature.

 

[ynotzap]

It’s a trick.

"Light as a feather, stiff as a board, sometimes known as Pig in a Blanket, Stiff as a Board, is a game played by children at slumber parties. The phrase has also become established in popular culture as a reference to a levitation trick, and has been referred to in various media accounts." - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_as_a_feather,_stiff_as_a_board

Demo’d by students here - youtube.com/watch?v=QZ9InzTLNjs

When a person tells the truth and his integrety is questioned there is nothing he can do except to leave the person to his own convictions. I t’s a sad state of affairs. Jesus suffered the same thing so who am I to be any different. I wasn’t deceived by any trick, If you are sincere you can contact my witnesses, I have their names. It’s a shame you believe you are right in your judgement but it’s not unusual, self-righteousness is a common fault.nor is there any condemnation in my statement,just something I know experiencially.

 

[ynotzap]

When a person tells the truth and his integrety is questioned there is nothing he can do except to leave the person to his own convictions. I t’s a sad state of affairs. Jesus suffered the same thing so who am I to be any different. I wasn’t deceived by any trick, If you are sincere you can contact my witnesses, I have their names. It’s a shame you believe you are right in your judgement but it’s not unusual, self-righteousness is a common fault.nor is there any condemnation in my statement,just something I know experiencially.

I also warned the T,V program “That’s Incredible” with Cathy Crosby, M.C that there was paranormal activity going on in the program. I told them what to do. they didn’t acknowledge me right away, but thanked me for my suggestion "To use the Name of Jesus, in a simple exorcism. Cathy announced on the program that they were going to perform a simple exorcism, and she said “You will be suprised at what happened” They never showed the program and the whole show was canceled. They were having all kinds of problems with the show, they were being sued, a person was injured going through a tunnel of fire, etc. I saw your reference video and I would suggest the same thing, and I have no doubt at what will happen. We live in a sensual, materialistic, pagan world, and it’s no surprise. We make scientific advances, but we demoralize society, it’s like giving a child a loaded gun to play with. I see people getting sucked, into this deceit. It can lead to no good for society. Already I see the devil’s activity world wide, murder, hatred, war, suffering, sensuality, broken homes, starving people, imbalance in wealth, greed. I do have hope, where sin abounds, grace abounds more. Only Jesus can save us from the evil forces, that’s why He came and only He can save us from ourselves. By the way where is the trick, pressing on one’s head like a spring, or placing one’s hands over a person’s head, didn’t science teach us anything, how does this empower one to lift a person with just fingers especially when they can’t do it normally. Magic, trick, science?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Surprisingly we actually agree on this point. Yes, if one proposed a way to predict how God would interact with our world, then that would lead to predictions that could be tested.

Unfortunately, I’ve never heard such a proposal, even from people who have taken it upon themselves to inject a god into science. For example, consider the “theory” of intelligent design. I’ve yet to hear a single testable prediction arise from that theory that hasn’t already been demonstrated by the theory of evolution. So the former is really a parasite, leeching off the success of the latter.

There is much in the theory of evolution that cannot be tested. We cannot predict how future life will evolve.

Abiogenesis, which defies classification as a product of evolution, begs for the explanation of intelligent design. The reason this is a reasonable deduction is that we know intelligent design when we see it … or at least see the appearance of it.

 

[Oreoracle]

There is much in the theory of evolution that cannot be tested. We cannot predict how future life will evolve.

This is partially correct. Evolutionary theory says that the way in which life develops depends on the ambient environment. Since we can’t predict natural disasters in the distant future, the development of life is also hard to predict.

I would argue that evolution provides an accurate scheme for predicting how life adapts to known environmental changes. If memory serves, I read an article a while back about the observation that, due to the increase in ocean temperature from climate change, some species of fish were gradually adapting to survive at higher temperatures.

Evolutionary theory predicted the geologic column. Darwin even wrote about such a thing before it was discovered.

The idea that we originated from the great apes led to an interesting prediction. We have one fewer pair of chromosomes than apes, so if we descended from them in (relatively) recent history, there must have been some mutation that fused the apes’ chromosomes together. Scientists have identified where this occurred in our genome.

Evolution neatly explains vestigial organs, such as our appendix and tail bones. Why would an intelligent designer give us organs that are now useless to us?

Speaking of seemingly un-intelligent design, there is a video on Youtube explaining how evolutionary theory explains why one of the nerves of a giraffe is unreasonably long (it runs the length of the giraffe’s neck) when no intelligent designer would have made it that way. This is because evolutionary theory uses natural selection as the “designer”, and natural selection is only concerned with what is advantageous in the short-term. So it makes different “decisions” than a designer interested in the long-term.

And even creationists admit that evolution hits the nail on the head when it comes to so-called “microevolution”. The need for new vaccines is easily predicted by evolution.

If you could point to similar predictions made by intelligent design not already predicted by evolutionary theory, then that might be more convincing.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

If you could point to similar predictions made by intelligent design not already predicted by evolutionary theory, then that might be more convincing.

Evolution is not the beginning of life. Abiogensis is the beginning of life, and there is no way that evolution accountsd for or predicts abiogenesis, although abiogenesis does predict evolution.

And then, of course, one might go back and look at he history of the universe, the elements of which are designed to predict life in almost every part of the universe just by the fact that the most dominant element of the universe is hydrogen. Evolution does not predict that. But when the Designer made hydrogen the most common element, he made it inevitable (you might say he predicted) that life would exist, and eventually human life would exist.

Then you have all the thousands of conditions required for a planet to produce the kinds of life that exist on this planet, a veritable cornucopia of wonderful life forms, including our friend the giraffe. For all we know, such planets as ours exist throughout the universe by design of the Designer. We know that from the mere creation of light everything else has followed as if by design. The universe at the start began to expand rather than to stabilize or even collapse upon itself. Evolution does not predict that. But religion does.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

Book of Genesis: Centuries before Christ: “In the beginning God said: ‘Let there be light.’”

As astronomer Robert Jastrow pointed out in God and the Astronomers.

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

GEORGE WALD Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology and one time atheist:

“Mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality - that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is Mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create.”

 

[Oreoracle]

Evolution is not the beginning of life. Abiogensis is the beginning of life, and there is no way that evolution accountsd for or predicts abiogenesis, although abiogenesis does predict evolution.

That is true. But I don’t see your point, because the theory of evolution doesn’t attempt to explain how life originated. It only attempts to explain how life is so diverse; that is, how speciation occurs.

If intelligent design proponents want to promote their theory as an explanation for abiogenesis, then they can do so. But they claim that their theory replaces evolutionary theory, not just our current understanding of abiogenesis. As I’ve pointed out, evolutionary theory yields many confirmed predictions that no other theory has yet improved upon.

So if you disagree with our current explanations for abiogenesis and cosmology, then I’d be happy to discuss those elsewhere. But right now I’m defending only evolutionary theory, which concerns speciation and the diversity of life, not its origins.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

So if you disagree with our current explanations for abiogenesis and cosmology, then I’d be happy to discuss those elsewhere. But right now I’m defending only evolutionary theory, which concerns speciation and the diversity of life, not its origins.

I’m not interested in attacking evolutionary theory unless it is used, as Dawkins and others use it, to dismiss God. The theory itself does not dismiss God, and that is why the Catholic Church in principle has no objection to the theory of evolution as science, unless it draws a philosophical, rather than a scientific conclusion, such as that evolution proves there is no need for God.

Since abiogenesis does not fall into the category of evolution, there needs to be an explanation for how it occurred. The likelihood that it occurred by chance cannot be proved or tested. So there’s no science there. To all appearances, the first living organism looks like it was designed because all its parts had to come together at once, not by a process of evolution or happenstance.

That is consistent with the unique event called the Big Bang, which gave hydrogen its one-time chance to dominate as an element of the universe, and thereby opened up the possibilities of life anywhere in the universe.

 

[yppop]

As I’ve pointed out, evolutionary theory yields many confirmed predictions that no other theory has yet improved upon.
.

Oreoacle,
Just out of curiosity, could you name a few of the confirmed “predictions” of evolutionary theory?
Thanks
Yppop

 

[inocente]

OK… I think most people here are familiar with Newton’s laws, but none of this really disputes anything I’ve said about what the form of our laws suggests about what they lead us to believe. Actually you seem to agree with me that it leads us to acknowledge an actual disposition in matter, a tendency to “keep on doing whatever it has been doing.” (Though this is consistent with matter having a “desire” in the Aristotelian sense, which doesn’t mean that matter has a mind and desires things like I now desire a cup of coffee. But I think you knew that.)

This may be fussy but I’d be uneasy referring to inertia as a disposition. Aristotle thought that all matter is animated (his element earth had a disposition to move to the center of planet earth and so on). Galileo disproved that by showing that matter is inert, acted upon rather than acting. Imho we should avoid blurring the line between the two of them.

As you note, explaining one thing does not explain everything. Often what you have invoked to explain the first thing itself will call for explanation (though not immediately). (We would need a good reason to call just any old physical entity self-explanatory or brute. For it would have to be absolutely distinct from all of the other entities we are invoking it to explain, or else why would we feel as though we should invoke it?)

Yes, and we may never have a theory of everything.

I’m not aware of any metaphysicians who have ever tried to do that. Metaphysicians are not natural scientists, and metaphysics has never existed for the sake of natural science.

I think armchair metaphysicans do try to answer those kinds of question. I googled “metaphysics main problems”. Have a look at the headings in the two first hits:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics#Central_questions
plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics (section 3)

 

[inocente]

What teacher does not appeal to authority? Maybe in a graduate seminar in the sciences, where you might conduct experiments for everything you are taught. But otherwise authority is inextricable from teaching. (And that is no defect.) Even a teacher who tells you the result of certain experiments that you haven’t performed is appealing to authority. That is how most education proceeds; and it generates real knowledge.

OK, but perhaps the most important lesson for a science student is that the final arbiter is experiment, so she must make up her mind based solely on the content of what she is being told, and ignore how famous or important a scientist is.

But it’s not the case that the patterns just are; that’s why we try to explain them by positing space-time.

By “just are” I mean the world rather than what we make of the world. Things behave as they do simply by being what they are. They don’t have a list of laws to obey. They just are what they are, and the laws are our interpretation.

Can you clarify? “Everything is everything” appears to be a tautology and therefore could be deduced a priori, regardless of what physical entities we posit. It appears to be contentless. (Perhaps there is another way to read it; it is surely meant as an imprecise slogan, after all. It could avoid vacuity if it equivocates on “everything,” for example, and means a different thing each time.)

I mean that in physics, everything is what it is because of everything else.

Electricity and magnetism were first thought of as separate but were found to be related. The history of physics is littered with such discoveries. Spacetime tells us that space and time exist jointly, and in some sense the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is more fundamental than either; E = mc[sup]2[/sup] tells us not simply that mass and energy have an equivalence, but there’s that c again. The mass of an atom is largely in the relativistic jiggling of the quarks in its nucleons. Perhaps the remaining small fraction of the mass is accounted in the same way, implying that under the covers matter is just spacetime (string theory or something better).

So with all these linkages it would seem that without everything being how it is, nothing would be as it is, so in that sense everything is everything.

What exactly does “All phenomena are interdependent” mean? Does that mean when I snap my fingers it depends on a butterfly in Argentina flapping its wings in 1970? (And this is interdependence we are talking about, so surely the butterfly also depends on my future snapping.)

Sorry, I was referring to classes of phenomena, mass, gravity and so on rather than individual events.

*But what does this mean? Fix the meaning of “the entirety.” Then if the entirety were not, then the parts would not be.

I apologize for being difficult. But you started waxing poetic and your last few statements all appear to be vague, tautologous/trivial, or both.*

By entirety I mean the whole of physics. We can imagine a universe with spacetime but without matter or light, but I conjecture its physics would necessarily be different from ours.

*Your argument is unclear, maybe just because you are suppressing a lot of your reasoning. (As we’ve noted, “everything is everything” is prima facie contentless, so it would need to be fleshed out to mean anything to me.) But how would interdependence imply that all patterns “resolve” (whatever that means) to one single pattern?

Suppose that phenomena A and B generate pattern x, and phenomena B and C generate pattern y. The patterns appear “interdependent” (at least in one sense of that term–you have introduced it with relatively little explanation so I just have to guess), but don’t resolve to a single pattern. (Or perhaps they do, if for any two patterns x and y I can simply view a new pattern x & y, but that is, again, trivial, and obviously independent of any finding of physics.)*

Hopefully this is now clearer. As more and more connections of the electromagnetism type are discovered, we approach the notion that originally, in the moment of the big bang, there was just one kind of “stuff”, whatever “stuff” might mean. All the physics we know and love condensed out of that much more simple state, but is still that same “stuff” behind the scenes. That’s what I meant by single pattern.

 

[inocente]

“This most beautiful system [the solar system] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Isaac Newton

No he wasn’t wrong about this. The remark of Newton is a logical deduction based upon empirical evidence of an intelligence at work in creation. God does not have to be part of the laws in order to be the source of the laws. He doesn’t have to be in the equations to be the fire in the equations.

Darwin and Einstein agreed. So did Lemaitre. And you are sending me to U-tube for an authoritative rebuttal to Newton, Darwin, and Einstein?

Newton was wrong. The solar system resulted from collisions of debris gradually producing planets orbiting in one plane in one direction, which hoovered up pretty much everything else. It took a long long time, and Newton was probably under the illusion that the universe wasn’t sufficiently old, or he might have twigged. Though agreed it is most beautiful.

There’s an immense difference between scientific theories and statements made by scientists. The former are robust and testable, the latter include the ramblings of Dawkins and Hawking et al. Neither they nor Newton are authorities.

 

[Oreoracle]

I’m not interested in attacking evolutionary theory unless it is used, as Dawkins and others use it, to dismiss God. The theory itself does not dismiss God, and that is why the Catholic Church in principle has no objection to the theory of evolution as science, unless it draws a philosophical, rather than a scientific conclusion, such as that evolution proves there is no need for God.

Evolution doesn’t prove there is no need for God in general, but I think it certainly proves that we don’t need gods to explain speciation.

Which brings me back to why this topic arose. You suggested that there could be a legitimate way of invoking God in science–that someone could investigate why or how God does what he does. I agreed that such a proposal could lead to predictions that could be verified or falsified, but I have seen no such examples. I think intelligent design is representative of what happens when one tries to invoke God in science. The result is a discipline that is only as successful as the science that preceded it, producing nothing of its own.

Since abiogenesis does not fall into the category of evolution, there needs to be an explanation for how it occurred. The likelihood that it occurred by chance cannot be proved or tested.

Source? I trust you’ve heard of the experiments which show that amino acids and the like could arise naturally from the composition of Earth’s ancient atmosphere.

So there’s no science there. To all appearances, the first living organism looks like it was designed because all its parts had to come together at once, not by a process of evolution or happenstance.

That is consistent with the unique event called the Big Bang, which gave hydrogen its one-time chance to dominate as an element of the universe, and thereby opened up the possibilities of life anywhere in the universe.

Even if we caved in and just said that “Goddidit” is the answer, that isn’t a confirmed prediction. A prediction (in science) is basically new information suggested by a theory. We already knew about the prominence of hydrogen before people started marveling that God gave us all of this hydrogen. So what you’re doing isn’t predicting, you’re just manufacturing a model that coincides with old information. Predicting new information=/=agreeing with old information.

Oreoacle,
Just out of curiosity, could you name a few of the confirmed “predictions” of evolutionary theory?
Thanks
Yppop

I listed several in post #90.

 

[inocente]

When a person tells the truth and his integrety is questioned there is nothing he can do except to leave the person to his own convictions. I t’s a sad state of affairs. Jesus suffered the same thing so who am I to be any different. I wasn’t deceived by any trick, If you are sincere you can contact my witnesses, I have their names. It’s a shame you believe you are right in your judgement but it’s not unusual, self-righteousness is a common fault.nor is there any condemnation in my statement,just something I know experiencially.

Don’t take your bat home, I wasn’t questioning you or your friends’ integrity, just posting a well-known explanation which doesn’t involve an appeal to the supernatural. Occam’s razor applies.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . just posting a well-known explanation which doesn’t involve an appeal to the supernatural. Occam’s razor applies.

You did not explain:

“This time I said out loud “Father, in the Name of Jesus expel this deceiving spirit” I sat down again and this time they couldn’t lift me. Several people tried and they were unsuccessful. They moved me by shear force from side to side, but they could not lift me.”

Whatever, I wouldn’t over-extend myself to find an explanation. I was not there; it would have been pretty interesting.