The point is, he could have easily said that God created life on earth. But he’s willing to propose that aliens did it.
Thank you for your support, Reggie. Regardless of whether Dawkins is a fervent proponent of the idea or not, he has entertained the notion numerous times and there are many leading scientists who continue to do so because they recognize that life appears too soon in the geological record to have originated on Earth by natural processes. That’s the important point.
So you admit that you will not consider scholarly material submitted to back up “personal” experience for your perusal, consideration, and *thinking" about. It’s about time. Thanks. I love it when someone admits a hoax.It is pointless attempting to have a rational discussion with a person whose posts are replete with personal remarks, argumenta ad hominem and failures to refute statements - as several others have already discovered…
No, the point is that he didn’t actually propose that aliens did it. He said it out of frustration so they would stop bothering him.
The fact that Dawkins has no philosophical background or qualifications explains why he utterly fails to grasp the inadequacy of materialism. He is a classic example of a scientist completely out of his depth who vainly attempts to extrapolate from biology to metaphysics, ethics and epistemology, sedulously avoiding issues such as the nature of truth, goodness and free will which would totally undermine his naive scientism. The naked ape has a very long way to go…
…Abiogenesis does not provide a solution for the origin of life - for a number of reasons. There is no scientific evidence supporting the emergence of life from non-living matter – and no scientific consensus on how the origin of life occurred.
I hope (but not necessary expect) that he would see the problems that atheism cause in his worldview. Seeding by aliens is an assertion. It leads to an infinite regress. It’s not even an explanation for the origin of life. It multiplies intelligent agents out of nothing. It’s basically a creation myth for atheists – just as the multiverse is.
True. I don’t want to get sidetracked on a debate about Dawkins’ views because that’s not the point. Panspermia is an idea that emerged because abiogenesis does not work as an explanation. Francis Crick took the idea very seriously. Panspermia points to design as an explanation.
Correction – he considers it an unlikely but somewhat legitimate option.
That is a devastating critique.… a classic example of a scientist completely out of his depth who vainly attempts to extrapolate from biology to metaphysics, ethics and epistemology, sedulously avoiding issues such as the nature of truth, goodness and free will which would totally undermine his naive scientism. The naked ape has a very long way to go…
Extrapolating from biology to metaphysics makes it impossible to explain the origin of biology. Basically, it replaces metaphysics, ethics and epistemology with biology – since all human behavior and thought is reduced to biological functions. The fact that there is a science of biology which can be used to explain reality is evidence of design, not of random chance.Uh…yes there is and yes there is.
Wasn’t trying to defend Dawkins. I was just trying to clarify that the idea that he supports the belief that aliens seeded this planet is simply false. I’m trying to defend fact checking.
There is no scientific consensus as to how life originated and all proposed theories are highly speculative.
Ok. You asked me what I expected from him.
I would agree that there is no scientific consensus as to how life originated. But this statement is not the same as the ones you said above that I was correcting.
Uh…life exists, thus it is 100% probable. Did you mean to say something else?
Dawkins would be the first one around the table that there is NO SUPPORT for the panspermia hypothesis. None. He allows it as a legitimate possibility, because it is a legitimate possibility, something we could in some possible future discover was the actual case, and this hypothesis would then represent a natural explanation for biological life on earth, and one that is contingent on intelligent agents. It’s a hypothesis that has nothing going for it but being scientifically relevant, which is more than one can say for “God did it”. Think of it as Dawkins’ (and my) way of pointing out the intellectual poverty of creationism and religious forms of Intelligent Design. Panspermia, as much of an abject loser as that idea is, at least can qualify in principle as a contending hypothesis. Creationism can’t. It’s a superstition.
If we are here, it’s at least plausible to suppose that other sentient life forms may exist in the universe. We have no evidence of this, but if it can happen here, we are not aware of any reasons why it could not happen somewhere else. If that’s a possibility, then that holds the prospect of a natural visit by these natural beings engaging in natural interactions on this planet that produce natural contexts for biological life. It’s an incredibly weak hypothesis, but it’s Mr. Universe compared to a religious superstition. It might possibly obtain in a scientific sense, which is more than can be said for the superstition.
That’s an equivocation on “evidence”. Science works with models, and advances mechanisms and dynamics in those models that rely on resources and agents that are either directly observed or plausibly inferred (for example, that other sentient beings may exist in the universe, just because we do and we’re just natural stuff like the rest of the universe – other exotically hospitable environments for biological life are quite likely given the number of galaxies, stars, etc.).
As Aquinas would say “this we call God”. If it’s aliens, they are the gods, the Creators of Life on Earth. If it’s Yahweh, then he’s the Creator God. If its Odin, then Odin. Quetzacoatl maybe, or…
Dawkins doesn’t support “Intelligent Design”, capitalized as a proper noun, the ideological and political activist movement associated with Dembski, Behe, Paul Nelson, Phillip Johnson and the rest of that gang. ID supports claim that Dawkins rules out the possibility of life on earth originating as the result of the work of intelligent agents (non-capitalized, not a proper noun), to which Dawkins responds by pointing out that that is demonstrably false, since he considers panspermia a legitimate possibility as a natural explanation for the origin of life, if a weak and unsupported on, evidentially.
Oy. Have you read any Dawkins at all? It can’t be very much, because just a casual familiarity with Dawkins’ ideas will prevent statements like this. This is a point that Dawkins makes regularly, himself, and points out as a problematic entailment of the panspermia hypothesis. He regularly points out that a panspermia explanation just pushes the problem back a level, with even less time for sentient beings to arise naturally.
OK, just take a minute, and consider, just provisionally, that you are badly mistaken in your understanding of Dawkins on panspermia. All the points you are offering here are points he makes himself on the hypothesis. You are criticizing him by making the very points he makes, over and over.
No, there’s a contrast. As untenable as panspermia is – and it’s really a “technically qualified only” hypothesis at this point – it’s Superman in terms of its strength over “God as creator”, which is an idea that cannot get off the ground, and can’t be rectified with an epistemology that requires empirical explanation and liability to falsification. As a matter of principle and intellectual honest, Dawkins, and the rest of the scientific thinkers must acknowledge the legitimacy of panspermia as a hypothesis – not a successful, evidence supported theory, but a scientific conjecture. “God as creator”, from a Catholic, can’t even rise to that, and must convalesce as superstition.
No, see above. If an intelligent agent (or group of agents) is responsible for the creation of biological life, that agent is by definition, our creator-god.
Why is that a prior commitment? I was a Christian for decades, born and raised. I had no such prior commitment. After the fact, looking at everything I could, all the evidence available to me, theology just scored a “zero” in terms of performative explanations and accountable epistemology. That doesn’t mean, a priori, that naturalism is true. It means that after reviewing everything out there, theology is sham that cannot perform, or even cohere, leaving the only performative players on the explanatory field the natural ones.
Dawkins grants, as I do, that the theist superstition is a possible explanation. It could be. So says Dawkins, so say I. We just don’t have any basis to think that’s actually the case, and the performative models we do have that establish knowledge about our universe do not have need for any god.
No, he’s quite confident in the actuality of abiogenesis. Panspermia, AGAIN, is admitted as legitimate in form, but a total loser compared to abiogenesis. Dawkins doesn’t have any basis to dismiss panspermia as a possibility (and neither do I), so he does not dismiss it summarily (and neither do I). But it’s not a hypothesis he thinks has a snowball’s chance in hell of being validated in the future (and neither do I). If you gave me 10,000:1 odds on abiogenesis vs. panspermia being validated eventually, I’d take the 10,000 divisor and bet on abiogenesis in a heart beat.
OK, you’re quite confused on Dawkins position. Go read some more Dawkins, and we can argue about the merits of what he really does believe and advance.
Yes, because scientists spend more attention on panspermia that ID advocates do, and scientists think that hypothesis is a loser! ID is a front for a religious superstition, and it judiciously but disingenuously plays coy about its convictions about “The Designer” to make the religious basis for IDM less politically damaging. IDM is a religious superstition coupled to a political activist movement supporting that superstition. Panspermia is a loser-but-valid scientific hypothesis that could not be less interesting to IDM. As you point out yourself, panspermia just kicks the can down the road one more step, and reverts back to your Creator God superstition anyway.
Yes, sure. Requiring natural semantics only means that you are limiting hypotheses to being… natural. There’s plenty of room for wild-eyed conjecture and fabulous imaginations and superstitions on natural terms. Natural terms just means that, fabulous or no, we have a way to reason about them, and assess them with some level of objectivity and analytical accountable, because any evaluation is grounded in experience, grounded in an empirical epistemology. Thinking in natural terms is not a panacea, and leaves plenty room for silly and non-performative ideas (remember that young earth creationism is a thoroughly scientific idea, that the earth is less than 10,000 years old). It does, however, avoid the annihilating epistemic effects of admitting supernatural intuitions and propositions.Let’s take it farther … Dawkins’ aliens could have evolved immense powers. They could be ruled by a single alien that has reached a peak of power and intelligence – far beyond human capabilities. This alien could have directed the seeding of planet earth. (I could write fantasy stories like that all day.
Hey, that’s theology, man. You don’t need to defend it. If it’s a serious proposition, it needs a serious epistemology to be grounded in, and theology can’t provide one. Anything goes, theologically. It’s a free-for-all domain of philosophy.
Aquinas, and Aristotle before him, were at least as superstitious as a your average YEC is, and probably more. At least Ken Ham advances ideas that IN PRINCIPLE could be (and have been) falsified. That demonstrates an allegiance to realism and sense experience that classical philosophy (at least for those I believe you are thinking of) were completely reckless and superstitious about. How would you validate “support” for Aquinas’ view of motion, from potency to actuality, and that as “evidence” for a god? You can’t it’s not a falsifiable, liable, accountable idea. It’s just a shallow tautology.
I don’t need to name any particular Designer. The idea that there must be a designer at all – put your own name and profile on that agent as you wish – is the impoverished idea, here, the superstition that’s problematic.
It allows for (as it must) plausible design inferences on natural explanations. But it doesn’t lend credence to any supernatural designer intuition.
No, we’d be able to render hypotheses, but we’d have to have some evidence to test this idea against to be able to “know” such a thing. It may be, and looks like, on the evidence, that biological life is an emergent property of impersonal, natural processes. Given that option, we cannot “know” there are such designers without substantiating their existence and participation through evidence that implicates both. Not “theological evidence” (!), but real, empirical evidence.
You’re providing philosophical evidence to support your views. The question of what a plausible inference is, or what a model is, for example, cannot be solved by science. You propose that something can be “possible” and also “superstitious”. Another thing can be “plausible” but have no support. All of these ideas are philosophical evidence – and it sounds like you’re dismissing the reliability of the very thing you use to draw conclusions.
As above, it’s contradictory and confusing. Science doesn’t “take” anything – and it doesn’t generate it’s own epistemology – it is dependent on a philosophical structure for its own existence. Science itself is one of those fabulous notions from philosophy. Your claim that only empirical things can serve as agents cannot be proven by science – it’s a philosophical assumption that science works with.
Again, philosophical distinctions. If its aliens, then science can study their interaction with earth. Science can observe evidence of design that come from aliens. If the aliens created life on earth, then they are the gods. If Yahweh created life on earth, then we study the same evidence.
How did you determine that the existence of God is “possible”? Under what conditions would that possibility be fulfilled?
But we also have a way to reason about non-empirical data and philosophical propositions. Limiting the discussion to what physical science alone can evaluate is impossible and contradictory.
That’s not how Catholicism views theology. It starts from revelation to a community and is preserved and communicated through texts and documented experience – and history. You can’t just make up facts and it’s not a free-for-all. I don’t know if you are just trolling here in order to insult people but you might want to consider one of the forum rules:
I would start with cosmological arguments. Every effect must have a cause. In every observed chain of events there must be a beginning. To avoid an infinite regress there must be a first cause. Everything that began to exist had a cause. Every contingent thing depends on something else for its existence – and to avoid an infinite regress there must be a non-contingent thing at the beginning.
As far as materialists are concerned metascience is a philosophical invention! Science is seen as quite capable of explaining and justifying itself - and everything else for that matter (although an accidental existence doesn’t need justification…)That is a devastating critique.
It seems you are confusing reasoning with evidence. We reason on the evidence, but the reasoning itself is not the evidence, unless the subject is whether we are reasoning (in which case, our experience of reasoning is evidence to consider). We can ply all manner of conjectures, but this is not evidence. If your conflation of the two were to work out fine, we wouldn’t need any sense data to consider. “Evidence” for my purposes here should be understood to be observations that are contingent on extra-mental attributes of the world around us, not cognitive artifacts of reasoning. Reasoning is crucial, but it’s not dispositive regarding the state of the world outside our mind, on its own. Knowledge about the world obtains from reasoning against that outside information, information from the world outside the mind coming into our minds.
That’s what epistemology is – it’s the philosophy of knowledge and knowing. Science has its own epistemology – it cannot escape having one, as it’s entailed by its metaphysical axioms.
Yes, this is scientific epistemology. Natural explanations for natural phenomena. Science only understands and processes natural phenomena and natural explanations, and this is governed by empirical observation. So it’s true-by-definition that anything that science can “prove” (science doesn’t ‘prove’ as much as it “fails to falsify”) is empirical; that’s the only terms it understands for phenomena and for explanation.
No, unless you are saying that Yahweh is a natural entity that operates in a natural context that can be observed and modeled by science, in the way aliens can (or humans can be, and are studied, say in anthropological contexts).
Philosophically, we say it’s possible on the ground that the idea doesn’t entail a logical contradiction. The actuality of a God does not produce a logical contradiction, nor does the absence of a God or gods. So these are logical possibilities to consider. That is not to say we have knowledge that grounds any necessary and sufficient context for God to exist. It’s just not a divide by zero to consider, if provisionally, that a god exists, or no god exists.
Sure, at least as far as philosophical propositions goes. “Non-empirical data” I cannot distinguish from “non-existent data”, so that’s a problem. But reasoning about philosophical propositions allows for conjecture and tautology, both of are useful in their own way, but neither of which are dispositive toward knowledge.
It’s neither, and “what is science” is a function of what we can evaluate on the basis of evidence. If new forms of evidence become available, and we can evaluate it, it is necessarily a part of the domain of scientific inquiry, by definition.
Well, that’s a most impoverished and irrational foundation to rest on, isn’t it? Revelation? As the anchor? If it didn’t have the cultural conditioning of centuries of popular assent, we’d laugh at such a proposition if it was new, and for good reason. Documented testimony does not entail documented experience, as you well know. Or did Joseph Smith really receive divine golden plates from an angel? Did Mohammed really take a Midnight Journey to Jerusalem, and then up to heaven to meet with God in person?
You know, the Catholic priest I talked to when I was preparing to enter RCIA years ago insisted that the resurrection of Jesus was a fact, a fact he know on faith. That’s the apotheosis of making up facts, and that’s as ‘free-for-all’ as any other example you might contrive. We might as well imagine the world is 6,000 years old, ya know?
No, I’m familiar, and am careful to not mince words or degrade the discourse if cheesy euphemisms, but also to avoid inciting language for inciting’s sake. Look, it’s a pretty dire situation, intellectually, that the Catholic faith is in. That’s not hyperbole or insolent, it’s just a fair assessment, and probably a charitable one, from my perspective. I’m just fine keeping that language more clinical and academic, but it’s still gonna hit like a ton of bricks in some cases, because it’s not a matter of respect or disrepect, but of the ramification of contradictions. Catholics may be right, but if they are mistaken, they are in a ridiculous position. St. Paul said as much, right?
This is a tautology, though. What we mean by “effect” is “something caused”. That statement tells us nothing about the world, and reduces to “Every caused thing has a cause”. Yup, can’t disagree, there. But that does not and cannot speak to the causation and dynamical principles in nature, because it hasn’t taken heed of them!
No, that’s not the case. Our universe may be the “now-for-us” node in an eternal chain of collapsing and expanding universes, for example, which would mean that ALL of this is eternally cycling, and there is no beginning for anything – everything is eternal an uncaused.
Not necessary! You’ve read some of the literature on this, right?
Again, a tautology, and in this case, a sophistical one. “Began to exist” implies a cause in a definitional sense.
Oy. I can’t believe this hasn’t been addressed umpteem times on this forum. Perhaps I’ll go search for the old threads. I know I personally have worked this claim over at length myself here more than once.
No, causality is still an indispensible feature of physical models. What has been made a practical experience is the folly of thinking that nature must operating according to our intuitions and self-serving definitions. Some phenomena are not only “without known cause”, but are “acausal” by implication of the model itself, meaning they must be “uncaused” in the mechanical sense to satisfy the model that we find works.
That’s a bit of philosophical eccentricity. I don’t know of a single physicist who imagines that a “philosophical nothing” ever obtained, and who didn’t understand the folly of even positing such an idea – think about that, “when philosophical nothing existed”. Rather, for the physicist, “noithing” is “no thing”, where “thing” abides by scientific semantics – no extension of Space/Time/Energy/Matter. But that nothing is not a philosophical nothing, which philosophers who are ignorant of science regular imagine they are discovering something when they realize that a philosophical nothing is not the same as a “scientific nothing”. Scientists just roll their eyes, as the philosophers congratulate themselves on their fixation on “philosophical nothing”.